Indian police gun down 8 escaped prisoners

BHOPAL // Indian police on Monday gunned down eight members of a banned militant group who escaped from a high-security jail by slitting the throat of a prison guard and scaling the walls with knotted bedsheets.

The members of the Students Islamic Movement of India had been awaiting trial when they staged the breakout from the prison in Bhopal by murdering the warder with sharpened prison-issue steel kitchen plates in the middle of celebrations to mark the Hindu festival of Diwali.

Police said they were later cornered on the outskirts of the city in the central state of Madhya Pradesh 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,” said Yogesh Choudhary, Bhopal’s inspector general of police.

“They were unarmed but attempted to attack the police with stones. We had to shoot them.”

After using their bedsheets to climb and descend several walls inside the prison, the inmates managed to make their way on foot to a village 15 kilometres south of the city centre, despite a massive search.

Local residents had alerted police to the suspicious movements in the village, leading them to the raid.

The home ministry had earlier issued a nationwide red alert over the jailbreak while police had released mugshots of the prisoners, asking 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 said 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, a major Hindu festival when revellers traditionally set off fireworks which can shroud the night skies.

Seven members of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India group escaped from a jail in the town of Khandwa in 2013 and were arrested last year after being on run for over two years.

Indian authorities have blamed the group for the serial bombing of Mumbai commuter trains in 2006 which killed 187 people, as well as bomb blasts in New Delhi.

Hundreds of its members have been arrested in the past decade, but the group says it merely propagates an “Islamic way of life” for Indian Muslims.

* Agence France-Presse