MUZAFFARABAD: Two condemned prisoners escaped from the district jail of Kotli on Wednesday night allegedly due to the negligence of the staff concerned.

On the recommendations of the additional secretary home, Ansar Yaqoob, who is also the inspector general prisons, the AJK government on Thursday suspended jail superintendent Sardar Iftikhar Ahmed and deputy superintendent Raja Mohammad Younus.

The commissioner Mirpur division has been designated as the inquiry officer and directed to submit a report on the incident within 15 days.

According to a report, which the jail superintendent sent to the additional secretary home, death-row prisoners Babar, a resident of Garhi Habibullah in the district of Mansehra (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), and Mohsin Gohar, of Sahotar village in Muzaffarabad, were shifted to normal barracks on the directions of the Shariat Court.

On Wednesday midnight, ward checker Zafar Iqbal noticed that both the prisoners were missing from their cell, following which alarms were raised.

On hearing the alarms, the superintendent said, he along with the entire force entered the jail and found that both the prisoners were missing from their cell.

He claimed that he constituted search teams to hunt down the fugitives besides passing the information to the deputy inspector general prisons in Muzaffarabad and the deputy commissioner and SHO Kotli.

However, according to the additional secretary home, the incident was the outcome of sheer negligence and irresponsibility of the jail staff.

Meanwhile, the superintendent central jail Mirpur, Irshad Hussain Jaral, was transferred and posted as the superintendent district jail Kotli and the charge of the superintendent central jail Mirpur was given to deputy superintendent Yasir Sarfraz Kazmi till further orders.

Published in Dawn, August 12th, 2016