By IANS
New Delhi : About 600 inmates, held in the high-security Tihar Jail for minor offences, were ordered to be released by the Delhi High Court Monday after a probe into the recent deaths of six prisoners.
A division bench of Justice Pradeep Nandarajog and Justice P.K. Bhasin ordered the release saying, "All 600 inmates in Tihar Central Jail, jailed under Section 107 (breach of peace) and 151 (preventive arrest to check commission of cognisable offences) of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) due to non-furnishing of surety, would be released on furnishing a personal bond of Rs.2,000 each."
The court ordered the release after going through a report of a three-member committee appointed by it to probe into the spate of recent deaths in the overcrowded prison.
Tihar Jail had been rocked by death of six prisoners and one jail warder in seven days from June 6. The jail authorities had instituted a magisterial probe into all the deaths, while maintaining that they all had died of natural causes, including heat stroke.
The committee, in its report to the court said that recent deaths in jails happened due to overcrowding and lack of proper civic amenities, including scarcity of drinking water.
The high court directed the district magistrates to complete the hearing of such cases in six months.
While reprimanding the jail authorities for their failure to provide various civic amenities in jail, the court said fans and coolers should have been fixed in the jails before the onset of summer.
The high court had directed the Delhi Government and Tihar Jail authorities on June 13 to file a report within two days stating the reasons for the death of six inmates in one week.
The court had observed that it seemed that basic minimum amenities were not provided to them in the jail, which had more than 13,000 inmates in a prison meant for about 6,000.
Shalek Chand Jain, a social worker, said in a public suit that deaths in one of Asia's largest jails had become routine.
"In the past one week at least six people died due to excessive heat," said the petition filed by counsel Sugriv Dubey.
"The atrocities of the police is an open secret to the public and the innocent people are nabbed under the sections 107 and 151 of the CrPC on false charges for causing breach of peace and sent to jail even though the offence is bailable. The people are kept in judicial custody as the police does not want to relent," alleged the petition.
While seeking direction to the authorities to improve the conditions in the jails, the petitioner also asked for instituting a judicial inquiry to unravel the causes of the deaths of so many innocent people during summer.