Jailbreak bid: Gangsters use gas cylinder threat to divert authorities’ attention

GURDASPUR:Twenty-odd gangsters used the threat of exploding a cooking gas cylinder in an attempt to divert the attention of the authorities from a group of inmates who were busy creating an opening in the 13-inch thick outer concrete wall of the Gurdaspur central jail.

Ravi Dhaliwal

Tribune News Service

Gurdaspur, March 25

Twenty-odd gangsters used the threat of exploding a cooking gas cylinder in an attempt to divert the attention of the authorities from a group of inmates who were busy creating an opening in the 13-inch thick outer concrete wall of the Gurdaspur central jail.

Police sources say around midnight some hardened criminals got hold of the cylinder, normally used by the jail staff to prepare tea. They kept on threatening the officers that they would explode it.

A few hundred yards away, a group of 100 prisoners was busy stealthily creating a breach wide enough for one man to escape at a time in the western part of the compound.

The drama around cylinder threat went on for some time before officers finally realised that it was a ploy to divert their attention.

Sources say gangsters Jagtar Singh, Amit Gill and Pardeep Uppal were the ones who planned and executed the tactic.

“As we were busy ensuring that the inmates did not explode the cylinder, some prisoners, at the other end, were busy creating a hole by using farm implements that they had earlier taken from the jail tool room.”

They had almost succeeded but for our guards who spotted some unusual movement following which we decided to lob teargas shells. The shells did the trick and the prisoners retreated,” said a jail staffer.

Naunihal Singh, IG (Border), said when the prisoners were threatening to explode the cylinder, he and other senior officers tried negotiating with them. “They kept on piling us with demands that could not be met. Like, they demanded to bring back some gangsters whom we had shifted to other jails a few hours ago. They were holding the entire administration to ransom. Finally, we asked them to either go back to barracks or face the consequences,” said the IG who spent the night coordinating with senior officers.

ADGP (Prisons) Rohit Chowdhury said, “When they showed signs of mob mentality, we decided to react. It showed how in a mob people are influenced by their peers to adopt certain behaviours. In this case some gangsters were dictating terms while others were blindly following them. Collective fear stimulates mob mentality and tends to produce ferocity towards those who are not regarded members of this group. Decision making gets decentralised so anything can happen anytime. When it became clear that the inmates had started behaving like a mob we were left with no option except to retaliate.”

Naunihal Singh said keeping in view the history of prison riots which are extremely violent, it goes to the credit of officers commandeering the operation that the entire operation went off without even a single man being injured.