It might look like a sequence out of the 2005 movie, Apaharan, in which Tazreb Alam (Nana Patekar) and Ajay Shastri (Ajay Devgan) enjoy all kinds of luxuries inside their jail ‘suites’ but the facilities provided in a jail in Congress-ruled Kerala for some Marxists accused in a case pertaining to the murder of a rebel Marxist were perhaps stranger than the director’s imagination.
The awe inspired by the members of the Marxist killer gang in the district jail in Kozhikode was so intense that the prison authorities even threw in the dustbin an order from Home Minister Thiruvanchoor Radhakrishnan on June 12 for action over violation of rules for providing luxuries and modern communication facilities like smart phones to them.
It is now known that four of the first seven accused related to the murder of Marxist rebel TP Chandrasekharan in May, 2012 had been enjoying whatever facilities they wanted – liquor, special food, cigarettes, flashy clothes, mobile phones, etc – ever since their entry into the Kozhikode prison as detainees a month after the murder.
A police Intelligence report submitted to the Government had said that there were prison staff who would do anything to keep these accused – mainly ‘Kodi’ Suni, ‘Kirmani’ Manoj and Muhammad Shafi – happy. When they were unable to bring liquor through the gates, they used to throw PET-bottle booze into the compound over the high wall from outside, it said.
The report had even said that there were officials in the jail who would get up in reverence whenever anyone of that seven-member gang which had hacked Chandrasekharan to death passed by. It is said that the Intelligence wing of the police had submitted about 30 reports to the Home and Prisons departments on the need of shifting these accused into other jails.
Information on these reports have come out following reports on the communication facilities the accused had been enjoying in the jail, including smart phones which they used for conversing and for posting and sharing over Facebook pictures and messages, both political and personal.
The pictures the accused had posted on and shared over Facebook showed them in jovial mood, clad in casual dresses like three-fourths trousers and T-Shirts and sunglasses and smoking cigarettes. Though the DGP (Prisons) had tried to argue that these pictures were not taken from inside the jail compound he was forced to drop it later as the evidences were that strong.
Though reports on the regular mobile phone use by these accused had come out on the first of this month, neither the police nor the jail authorities have so far been able to confiscate any of those gadgets despite the many searches they conducted in the prison. What they have been able to find so far are some mobile chargers, batteries, mobile covers, etc.
Complicating the entire sensational murder case further, the police’s Cyber Cell has found that the accused had been talking to the witnesses in the case, their relatives and friends. It has also been found that Kodi Suni, head of the seven-man killer gang, had been using the same SIM which he had used during the period of conspiracy for murdering Chandrasekharan.
It is yet to be found whether these conversations had anything to do with 52 of the Prosecution witnesses turning hostile during the trial at the Special Additional Sessions Court in Kozhikode. However, the Government’s efforts to shift these accused to other jails received a setback with the trial court denying permission as they had to be present at the court during trial.
The development has led to an intense demand for the resignation of Home Minister Thiruvanchoor, mainly from his own Congress party owing to its rampant group wars. However, the CPI(M) remains unfazed with its argument that the detainees should not be held responsible for the failures of the Prisons Department and the Congress-led UDF Government.