NIA asked to open inquiry into the breakout of SIMI members from a Bhopal prison

Police gunned down eight terror suspects yesterday after they escaped from a high-security jail in Madhya Pradesh by slitting the throat of a prison guard and scaling the walls with knotted bedsheets.
The members of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) had staged the breakout from the prison in Bhopal by attacking and murdering the warder with sharpened prison-issue steel kitchen plates in the middle of celebrations to mark the festival of Diwali.
Police said they were later cornered on the outskirts of the city but resisted efforts to take them back into custody and were subsequently shot dead.
“We asked them to surrender but they tried to break the police cordon,” Yogesh Choudhary, Bhopal’s inspector general of police, said.
“They were unarmed but attempted to attack the police with stones. We had to shoot them.”
After using their sheets to climb and descend several walls inside the prison, the inmates made their way on foot to a village 15km south of the city centre, despite a massive search.
Police said local residents had alerted them about suspicious movements in the village, leading to the raid in the late morning.
The home ministry had earlier issued a nationwide red alert over the jailbreak while police had released mugshots of the prisoners, asking for the public to be on the look-out.
Police insist there was no breakdown in security at the prison, a supposedly maximum security facility which has a round-the-clock electronic surveillance system.
However four officials, including the prison’s superintendent, have been suspended and an inquiry launched into the escape.
Madhya Pradesh’s Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan told reporters the breakout posed a threat to national security and authorities swiftly mobilised all law enforcement arms to track the fugitives.
He said the National Investigation Agency had been asked to open an inquiry into the breakout and anyone found to have acted incompetently would be prosecuted.
Most of the inmates had been awaiting trial for “terror-related activities, sedition and robbery” for more than three years, although two of them had only been detained since February.
The breakout happened on the night of Diwali, when revellers traditionally set off fireworks which can shroud the night skies.
Seven SIMI members escaped from a jail in the town of Khandwa in 2013 and were arrested last year after being on run for over two years, later prompting the government to house all the arrested SIMI members in the high-security facility in Bhopal.
Domestic media raised questions about the men being killed in a “staged shootout”, with some networks reporting that the prisoners were neither armed nor carrying guns when the clash took place.
“They attacked the police and injured them. The police had no choice but to kill them. They were dreaded terrorists,” state Home Minister Bhoopendra Singh said.
In Hyderabad, All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen chief Asaduddin Owaisi demanded an inquiry by a Supreme Court judge into the escape and later killing of the SIMI suspects.
He termed the entire incident of escape and their subsequent killings as “very surprising” and “shocking”.
The AIMIM chief said it was perplexing that these escaped prisoners were fully clothed, wearing shoes, had watches and bands on wrists and belts on trousers.
“These things are not given to undertrials. Only a probe can unravel the truth as to how they got these things,” he said.
Owaisi said there was a huge discrepancy in what the Madhya Pradesh home minister and police officials were saying.
On the home minister’s statement that these fugitives were armed with spoons, he said ATS (Anti-Terrorist Squad) could have easily overpowered and arrested them.
“People who escaped from prison after assassinating a guard only had spoons. To any normal person, this theory is unbelievable and that is why I am of the opinion a proper and independent investigation has to be done,” he said, adding this was needed to know how these eight men fled a high security prison by killing a guard and the subsequent gunfight in which all were killed.
Authorities have accused SIMI of carrying out several deadly bombings and of having links with Pakistan-based militant groups.