Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt, who surrendered before the designated TADA court here on Thursday, spent his first night of the remaining 42 months’ jail term inside the transfer barrack of the Arthur Road prison in south Mumbai. He will in likelihood be shifted to Pune’s Yerwada prison in the early hours of Saturday.
Informed sources in the Arthur Road prison said on Friday that the 53-year-old actor — as per the penal procedures — was lodged in the transit or transfer barrack of the jail on Thursday night. “As is being reported in a section of the media, the actor has not been lodged in any anda (egg-shaped cell) meant for solitary confinement cell or the cell where Pakistani terrorist Mohammed Ajmal Kasab had been kept,” a senior prison official said.
Sources said that Sanjay was was lodged in the transit barrack along with other convicts who surrendered on Thursday in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case. However, there was no information about the identities of the inmates with whom the actor shared the transit cell.
In the normal course, the actor was to have been shifted from the Arthur Road prison, which is basically meant for lodging undertrials, to Pune’s Yerwada Jail on Friday.
However, with the jail authorities delaying the shifting of Sanjay to the Yerwada prison, owing to some logistic reasons, disappointment awaited the television crews that were staying put outside the Arthur Road prison all through Thursday.
Sources said in the evening that the jail authorities would in likelihood be shifting Sanjay by road from the Arthur Road prison to Pune’s Yerwada prison in the early hours of Saturday. However, the authorities are tight-lipped about the plans to shift Sanjay to the Pune jail for security reasons.
During his stay at the Arthur Road prison, the authorities allowed the actor to have home food — a facility that Special Judge GA Sanap had granted Sanjay for a month when he surrendered before him on Thursday to serve the remaining jail term of three and a half years in the 1993 Mumbai blasts case.
Meanwhile, asked to comment on a report in a section of the media that he had urged the TADA court to shift Sanjay from “anda” cell where Munnabhai is reportedly feeling “suffocated”, to some other cell in Arthur Road prison, the actor’s lawyer Rizwan Merchant told this newspaper: “I have not made any such application to the court”.
Queried as to he expected the jail authorities to shift Sanjay from Arthur Road prison to Pune’s Yerwada Jail, Merchant said: “ I cannot hazard a guess. The authorities will take a call on that”.
Sanjay, whose conviction was upheld but sentence in the 1993 Mumbai blasts case was reduced from the earlier six years (awarded by the TADA court in 2006) to five years by the Supreme Court on March 21, 2013 — will now have to serve a remaining jail term of three and a half years.