An eerie silence envelopes the dark Sher Shah Suri Road leading to Peshawar Central Prison as night descends on the provincial capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The road, one of the city’s main arteries, bustling with activity and flow of traffic during the daytime, wears a deserted look with armed personnel of local police deputed at different points. An APC (armed personnel carrier) and some police patrol vehicles are normally parked outside the colonial era prison, which has been fortified by placing sandbags and barbed wires around the boundary walls.
Since last year’s Dera Ismail Khan jailbreak, it is now a routine practice to block the routes leading to the prison within a radius of around a kilometre and stop all vehicular movement during the night. Keeping the prison secure is believed to be an uphill task given the precarious security situation in Peshawar as several of the localities in the outskirt turn into no-go areas after sunset.
Apart from deputing personnel of police and Frontier Constabulary, IjawansI of the Pakistan Army also conduct regular patrolling in the area as the Corps Commander House is located close by. In January this year, army personnel assumed control of the Peshawar Prison after receiving intelligence regarding the activities of certain militants imprisoned there. Some time back, a day-long search operation was conducted inside the prison, though the security sources claimed that it was a sort of rehearsal and exercise about how they would respond in case of any attack on the prison.
Similar security arrangements are in place for the province’s three other central prisons at Bannu, D.I. Khan and Haripur. The security of the prisons housing militants and other suspects charged under the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) has now turned into a nightmare for the authorities after the two high profile jailbreaks at Bannu and D.I. Khan in April 2012 and July 2013, respectively.
Keeping hardened militants in jail is a dangerous proposition for all involved
To avoid another such incident the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa home, prison and police departments are now taking “threat alerts” from the intelligence agencies and Crisis Management Cell seriously.
“The existing jails are old and not meant for hardened militants. We do not have any high security prison of international standards, but now high security zones in six of the existing prisons are under construction,” said the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Inspector General of Prisons, Kifayatullah Khan.
The IG said that as all the major prisons were under threat, they had placed a three-layer security arrangement there and were also closely coordinating with the army so as to seek their assistance in case of any militant onslaught on any of the prisons.
Militants arrested in various cases have presently been lodged in different prisons. In Peshawar, around 35 suspects belonging to different outfits, such as Lashkar-i-Islam (LI), Tehreek-i-Nifaz-i-Shariah-i-Mohammadi (TNSM), Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), etc. are imprisoned.
If intelligence information regarding a threat to a particular prison is received, the authorities have to shift suspects charged under the Anti Terrorism Act to different prisons. An official informed us that some time back several prisoners convicted for acts of terrorism were shifted to the D.I. Khan prison where security had been beefed up. Similarly, around 15 prisoners were reportedly shifted from Bannu Jail after the Bannu Division’s regional police officer (RPO) sent a letter to the provincial government informing about an expected attack on that prison.
If intelligence information regarding a threat to a particular prison is received, the authorities have to shift suspects charged under the Anti Terrorism Act to different prisons.
In the past, suspected militants were kept in various barracks, due to which they could exercise their influence in most parts of the prison. One such prisoner was a TTP commander Nadeem Abbas, who was known for dictating his terms to the administration. In August 2011, in a well-engineered plan, he, along with another militant Zakeem Shah, escaped after their companions attacked a police party which had taken them to a hospital; three cops were killed in the incident. Last year an anti-terrorism court awarded life imprisonment to a prison doctor and a police official for abetting in that crime.
To stop the arrested militants from exercising their influence on other prisoners, the authorities have segregated them from the rest of the prisoners and they are now kept in the same enclosure.
The use of cell phones by prisoners, especially militants, inside the prison has always been a matter of concern. The officials have frequently been recovering cell phones and mobile SIMs during search operations. In June last year, the authorities recovered 60 cell phones and dozens of SIMs from different prisons.
“Such search operations proves ineffective as some of the prisoners, especially those arrested in connection with militancy, are influential, and they easily manage to get a mobile phone with the connivance of some black sheep among the prisons employees within a few days,” said Noor Alam Khan, an advocate of the Supreme Court.
Following the Bannu jailbreak, cell phone jammers were installed in different prisons, but the performance of these jammers was not up to the mark. Frequent power outages also rendered these electronic gadgets non-functional.
The IG prison informed that after cancelling the contract with the present company they are now fulfilling legal requirements for the installation of new jammers which could effectively stop cell phone communication. Apart from that Mr Kifayatullah said that they had also been planning to procure cell phone tracing devices as presently they had been conducting a manual search for it. The provincial government has also allocated funds for procurement of other gadgets including walk-through gates, metal detectors, CCTV cameras and x-ray scanning machines.
About suspected militants inside the prisons, a prison official who does not want to be named said that they had to remain soft towards them due to threats to their families. He recalled that about three years ago miscreants had hurled hand grenades at the residence of one of their officers as he was strict towards the militants.
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, September 7th, 2014
