J&K bars govt hospitals for prisoners

The Kot Bhalwal jail, at present, has 243 inmates and most of them are foreign mercenaries. Apart from them, several leaders of the All Party Hurriyat Conference are also detained there.

The high security prison, from where an ideologue of the Pan Islamic Harkat-ul-Ansar, Maulana Masood Azhar, was recently released in exchange of the hostages at Kandahar, had witnessed attempts variousjail break attempts by the inmates in the past. Only two years ago, a dreaded Pakistani militant Mohammad Irfan along with some other militants had escaped from the jail under mysterious circumstances.

The staff at Kot Bhalwal jail had already initiated various precautionary measures in view of the repeated militants’ attempt to escape including restrictions on the movement of inmates and not to allow them stand on the roof-tops of their barracks.

However, Gen Abdullah’s escape from the Srinagar hospital made the Kot Bhalwal jail authorities to further beef up security measures initiated while taking an inmate out of the prison or bringing him back.

In this connection, sources said that they have decided to double the police escort taking a militant to the hospital for treatment, or to the court. Those escorting the militants have also been instructed not to stop the vehicle en route.

However, the jail authorities’ decision to refer jail inmates only to the police hospital has caused unrest amongthem, as this has led to curtailment of their activities to a greater extent. Substantiating, sources said that there have been frequent altercations between the jail doctors and the militants detained there during the last two days.

Significantly, the militants by and large insist on the jail doctor to refer them to only a particular doctor for treatment in GMC. In one such incident on February 3, the detained Hurriyat leaders Agha Syed and Aftab along with other jail inmates mishandled one of the jail doctors after he refused to refer to a private doctor.

It may be mentioned that there were directions from the High Court asking jail authorities to get Agha, regularly checked-up from a specialist as he is a patient of hyper-tension.

“But on examining him, our doctors did not find any such symptoms. So I wrote a letter in this regard to the High Court. But, so far we have not received any reply from their side,” informed Chanchal Singh, Kot Bhalwal jail superintendent.

There were also intelligencereports that militants were using their visit to hospital to meet their accomplices and couriers, who used to come there masquerading as patients. During the process they (jail inmates) not only use to share or pass on crucial information to their counter parts and sometimes also get in incriminating material from them, which was later distributed among other inmates, informed a senior intelligence officer.