Hyderabad: Yaseen Bhatkal, an accused in the Dilsukhnagar bomb blast in Hyderabd and founder of a terrorist group Indian Mujahideen on Monday denied that he was planning to escape from prison.
Yaseen who along with three other accused of the blast case was produced in Ranga Reddy district court on Monday, threw a piece of paper towards the reporters, which the police immediately impounded. Later the police said that Bhatkal wrote on the paper that the recent media reports about him were wrong.
Bhatkal’s denial came within a day of his mother Rihana Sidibapa expressing fears that police might kill her son in a fake encounter.
Yaseen’s name recently figured in the headlines with some reports claiming that, during a telephone conversation with his wife, Bhatkal said he will soon escape from jail with help from Damascus (capital of Syria).
The reports emanating from Delhi had claimed that this message was intercepted by an intelligence agency monitoring the conversation over the phone.
However the authorities in Charalapally Central Jail in Hyderabad strongly denied the reports and said Bhatkal spoke to his wife and mother over land line phone, a facility granted by the court and not over any mobile phone as claimed in the report.
Deputy Inspector-General of Police (Prisons) of Telangana A. Narasimha said that there was no question of Bhatkal or any other jail inmate using a mobile phone.
“It is baseless and untrue”, he said, adding that strict security arrangements and procedures were in place which made the smuggling of a mobile into the jail impossible.
The court had granted permission to Bhatkal to speak to his family over the phone twice a week in February last.
“Since then he spoke to his wife and mother 27 times and every time the conversation was recorded”, he said.
The official added Bhatkar’s conversations were recorded and handed over to the investigating agencies and there was no mention of any escape plan.
Under the phone facility, prisoners can talk to their families for up to a maximum of five minutes, after which the line automatically gets cut off, the authorities said.
Meanwhile according to a report from Bhatkal, the hometown of Yaseen, his mother alleged that there was a conspiracy by the police to kill her son. She said that Yaseen spoke to her many times and said that he feared the police would kill him in a staged encounter. She told the reporters that the false reports about his alleged escape plan to Syria were part of this conspiracy. “He is in a high security jail. How can he escape”, she asked.
17 people died in the twin bomb blast at the busy Dilsukhnagar bus stop in Hyderabad on February 21, 2013. Bhatkal, one of the main suspects in the blast, was arrested on August 28 the same year on the India-Nepal border at Motihari in Bihar and was chargesheeted along with three others.
