In 1999,Sanaullah almost escaped from Kot Bhalwal

Sanaullah Ranjay might have escaped from Kot Bhalwal 14 years ago but for an alert Central Reserve Police Force CRPF jawan on duty

Sanaullah Ranjay might have escaped from Kot Bhalwal 14 years ago but for an alert Central Reserve Police Force CRPF jawan on duty at the prisons main gate who reacted to odd sounds coming from the ground under his feet.

Sanaullah,who led a group of 11 Pakistanis attempting to tunnel out of the jail,was caught literally four or five feet away from freedom,DGP Prisons K Rajendra said. As CBI took over the investigation into the attempted jailbreak,Sanaullah was separated from other Pakistanis in the prison and kept with Indian prisoners,Rajendra said.

Prison sources said Sanaullah and the other Pakistani prisoners had dug a 100-foot tunnel from a septic tank near their barracks in the jails block No. 2 to a point under the road outside the prison compound,going under two prison walls,one 40-foot high,the other 70 feet.

They were caught out by the CRPF jawan as they dug upwards to the surface. Jail staff and the state police found two table fans,some blankets,iron rods and wooden logs in the tunnel. The prisoners had pulled an electricity wire to light a bulb inside.

One prisoner suffocated in the tunnel,and nearly a dozen policemen including the then superintendent of the jail were injured as the prisoners resisted attempts to seal the tunnel.

This was the second jailbreak attempt at Kot Bhalwal in less than a year. The earlier attempt had been successful,and three Pakistani militants,Mohammad Irfan Khan,Mohammad Khaliq and Mohammad Saleem Khan alias Abu Baqr,had escaped from the prison under mysterious circumstances.

Irfan had been in the jail for an attempt to assassinate the then governor of Jammu and Kashmir K V Krishna Rao and senior Army officials during the Republic Day parade at the M A Stadium in 1995. The governor and the Army officers escaped,but over half a dozen people were killed and many injured in the bomb explosion.

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Sanaullah was arrested in 1995 for his involvement in various incidents of bombing in Jammu city and surrounding areas during the previous year. A few months before his arrest,on November 28,1994,he had engineered a blast in a Katra-bound bus that killed 10 Vaishno Devi pilgrims and injured 43 at Ramnagar on the Jammu-Srinagar road.

He was also responsible for a bomb explosion on a Matador van near Satwari in which seven people were killed,and for a blast at Exhibition Ground near Jewel Chowk the same year.

Police said he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the blasts at Ramnagar and Satwari,and was facing trials in half a dozen other cases of militant violence.