Bangalore prisoners found dialling Pak

The discovery of phone calls to Pakistan prompted Karnataka DGP S T Ramesh to order searches in the prison by Crime Branch officials and installation of mobile phone signal jamming devices.

I would not like to confirm or deny anything about phone calls being made from the prison to Pakistan at this moment. It is a matter of speculation. In any case,the right authorities are seized of the use of phones in the prison and action has been initiated to curb it, Ramesh said.

As many as 10 phone calls were reported to have been made or received from the central prison to Pakistan over the last one year,according to a police scan of phone calls following intelligence reports of communication between the prison and Pakistan.

We have tried to verify the calls and it seems like one prisoner,Fahad,violated prison rules to talk to his girlfriend in Pakistan, police sources said. Efforts to track down the mobile phones used have not yielded results,the sources said.

Fahad,whose family hailed from Kozhikode in Kerala before settling down in Pakistan in the 1970s,was one of two alleged Al Badr operatives arrested in Mysore on October 27,2006 on the basis of Central intelligence alerts.

Fahad,who holds a Masters degree in Analytical Chemistry and carries a Pakistani passport issued in Karachi in November 2005,is accused of entering India to act as a sleeper cell to facilitate a terror attack. His alleged accomplice,Ali Hussain,also a Pakistan passport holder,too is in the same prison.

Sources said following the discovery of phone calls from the prison,efforts were on to shift Fahad to another prison. Fahad and Ali are among 14 terror accused lodged in the Bangalore prison.

Police officials rarely admit it but in recent years the use of mobile phones in prisons have been tacitly encouraged since it gives police a handle on the activities of prisoners and their networks outside prison.

Much of the unravelling of the Rs 3,000-crore fake stamp paper scam,perpetrated by Abdul Karim Telgi between 1997 and 2002,involved police teams listening into phone conversations of Telgi and members of his gang when Telgi was lodged in the Bangalore prison following his arrest in August 2001.