SRINAGAR: The Jammu and Kashmir police has arrested four persons for their alleged involvement in Tuesday's shooting incident at a Srinagar hospital during which Muhammad Naveed Jutt, alias Abu Hanzala, a Pakistani prisoner and former deputy commander of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), escaped.
Four other persons who are reported to have facilitated the getaway or were in close contact with the accused too have been taken into custody. The police which have been working overtime to lay their hands on the culprits also tracked down the motorcycle and the vehicle that were used for transporting Naveed to southern Pulwama from Srinagar's Sri Maharaja Hari Singh (SMHS) Hospital on February 6 morning.
The arrests were made on the basis of the CCTV footage of the SMHS hospital and the leads obtained during consequent investigations, the police sources said.
During the dramatic escape, a barrage of gunfire outside the Out Patients' Department (OPD) of the Valley's premier hospital had left two policemen dead. They were escorting Naveed and five other prisoners to the hospital from Srinagar's Central Jail for routine check-up. The handcuffed prisoner's running away in such a fashion came as a major embarrassment to the police which immediately set up a Special Investigation Team (SIT) headed by a superintendent of police to probe the incident. J&K's director general of police (DGP), Shesh Paul Vaid, has admitted it to be a "major security breach" and said that well-planned conspiracy which exposed the chinks in the security set-up could not be executed without connivance of people at the Srinagar's central prison. He said in an interview, "Definitely someone in the jail is involved. It was an escape planned inside the jail. It couldn't be coordinated without that."
The state government which has ordered a magisterial inquiry on Thursday placed jail superintendent Hilal Ahmed Rather under suspension and posted the Additional SP as the new head of the prison.
Naveed is at large. He narrowly escaped re-arrest when the police raided a private house in Pulwama, the police sources said. The sources added that Naveed had left the place merely 10 minutes before the police reached there on Wednesday.
He has since joined top commanders of Hizb-ul-Mujahedin in south Kashmir and, as per reports, is changing hideouts at intervals. On Thursday, two photographs showing him with the Hizb commanders Saddam Paddar and Aadil Malik went viral on social media.
