Free Press Journal: Mumbai:
Sunday, 23 July 2017.
Murder
convict Vijay Palande, who is imprisoned in Thane Central jail since 2012, is
giving a tough time to Maharashtra prisons authority and law enforcement agency
by teaching inmates how to file Right to Information (RTI) requests to delay
the beginning of their trials and find out loopholes in police investigations.
A
senior officer of Maharashtra prisons said, “Palande is a crafty inmate. His
hunger for knowledge related to his case is growing day-by-day. Now he is
teaching trial-delaying tactics to his co-prisoners to defend themselves facing
mandatory prison terms in most serious crimes like murder, rape, etc. A number
of prisoners have started filing RTI requests to find out flaws in police
investigations in their cases.”
After
learning the methods from Palande, now the prisoners in Thane jail are sending
RTI requests to know the case details of their inmates, and due to this,
Palande has developed differences with the inmates, according to another
officer of state prisons.
“For
safety and security reasons, we have kept Palande in a separate cell of Thane
jail,” said the officer. The state prisons officer said that Palande had filed
multiple RTI requests to know the minute details of ongoing cases registered
against him at various police stations in Mumbai. “He is still practising the
same method,” said the officer.
The
former Director General of Police (DGP) of Maharashtra, Pravin Dixit said,
“Generally the undertrial inmates send a number of RTI requests to keep the
investigating officers engaged in lengthy paper work so that they may not be
able to file the charge-sheet within 90 days, failing which the prisoner will
get bail and come out of judicial custody.”
Palande,
a convict in a double murder case who is yet to face trial in other brutal
murder cases that hit national headlines, is a master of disguise. He jumped
parole and underwent plastic surgery to change his look and allegedly killed
two others. Palande is believed to be one of the close associates of gangster
Santosh Shetty with whom he worked in Thailand to gather intelligence for
industrialists to extort security money.
The
Free Press Journal has learnt that prisons’ authority, recently, wrote a letter
to the Sessions Court to shift Palande from Thane to Mumbai jail.
“We
have acute shortage of staff to escort inmates to court or hospitals. There are
number of cases against Palande, whom we take to Mumbai court at least four
times in a week for hearings with extra forces in escort vehicles. If Palande
is shifted to Mumbai jail, harassment over his travel amidst busy road traffic
between Thane and Mumbai will be lessened. Above all, there is no case registered
against him in Thane commissionerate,” said the officer.
The
delay in trial contributes to the chronic overcrowding problem of Thane jail,
where around 3,300 inmates undertrial and convicts (both male and female) are imprisoned whereas its actual capacity is only 1,100.
A
crime branch officer of Mumbai police said, “By filing number of RTI requests,
Palande keeps investigators engaged in paper work rather than concentrating on
probe into the cases he is booked into.”
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