Yasin Malik case: Tihar Jail administration on Saturday suspended four officers in the Yasin Malik security lapse case including one Deputy Superintendent, and two Assistant Superintendents, prison officials said. Malik, who is in jail following his conviction and life sentence in a terror funding case, was brought to the high-security apex court premises in a prison van escorted by armed security personnel without the court's permission. He walked into the courtroom to the utter surprise of all present.
Voicing surprise at his presence, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told a bench of Justices Surya Kant and Dipankar Datta that there was a procedure for high-risk convicts to be allowed into the courtroom to argue their case personally.
Notably, the CBI had told the court that Malik, the top leader of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, was a threat to national security and cannot be allowed to be taken outside the Tihar jail premises.
Taking the seriousnous of the matter into cognisance, Deputy Inspector General (Prisons-Headquarters) Rajiv Singh said that a inquiry would be conducted to find out the lapse and fix the responsibility of erring officials.
Solicitor General wrote to Union Home Secretary
Mehta also wrote to Union Home Secretary Ajay Kumar Bhalla over the "serious security lapse". "It is my firm view that this is serious security lapse. A person with a terrorist and secessionist background like Yasin Malik who is not only a convict in terror funding case but has known connections with terror organisations in Pakistan could have escaped, could have been forcibly taken away or could have been killed," Mehta wrote.
(With PTI inputs)
