Prisoners escape by scaling walls with tied bed sheets
NEW DELHI: Scores of inmates staged a mass breakout from an Indian young offenders detention centre yesterday by tying bedsheets together and then scaling down the walls of the threestorey building, police said. A total of 91 inmates, including several convicted murderers, managed to flee the facility in Meerut overnight, although 35 have since been recaptured, said the city’s superintendent of police Om Prakash.
“They removed an iron grille from a window at the back of the building while police were guarding the front,” Prakash said from Meerut in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. “This was done so professionally that no one got a whiff,” Prakash added. Those still on the run included inmates convicted of crimes such as murder, rape, theft and banditry, Prakash added. All are aged under 18.
Police say the break-out was staged sometime between 1:00am and 3:00am and the alarm was only raised when officers who were patrolling near the centre spotted some of the fugitives trying to flag down public transport. Inmates from the same centre beat a policeman to death in December after he objected to their lewd behavior with a woman during a court trial. More than 31,000 inmates are being held at young offenders institutes in India, according to the latest available set of official statistics. Although they are meant to be under lock and key overnight, inmates usually sleep in dormitories rather than individual cells.
Potential IS recruits freed
Meanwhile, Indian authorities have released nine people who had been deported from Turkey after allegedly trying to enter an area of Syria controlled by the Islamic State militant group, police said yesterday. Police in the southern city of Bangalore said the nine Indians were released late Sunday, after they admitted during questioning that they had planned to cross over to territory controlled by IS but denied being members of the organization, which is banned in India.
“We set them free as no incriminating material or any evidence was found against them,” Bangalore police chief MN Reddi told reporters Monday. “No case was registered but they were warned against making such attempts in future,” he said. Turkish authorities detained the nine people-a family of seven and two engineers who were in the country on tourist visas-as they were trying to enter Syria on Friday. Police quoted the group as telling their interrogators that they had only wanted to help civilians who had been affected by the fighting in Syria and Iraq, large parts of which are also controlled by IS.
Thousands of foreign jihadists are believed to have joined IS which has seized swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria, ruling with a brutal version of Islamic law. The group has murdered a number of foreigners, including American, British and Japanese hostages. India banned the Islamic State group in December after police found a sympathizer who was running a Twitter account and was suspected of online recruitment. Although India has the third largest number of Muslims in the world, only a few are so far reported to have joined the militant group. — AFP