The Tihar Jail administration in New Delhi has suspended four officers in Yasin Malik security lapse case, PTI reported.
The suspended officers include 1 Deputy Superintendent, 2 Assistant Superintendents and 1 other officer. Solicitor General of India Tushar Mehta had written to Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla on how Yasin Malik was presented before the Supreme Court yesterday without being summoned.
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. 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.