TN’s history of Prison breaks

Rajesh, a thief, was arrested and lodged  at the Puzhal Central Prison on July 1. On  the afternoon of July 6, the jail staff realised Rajesh was missing from his cell, which triggered a frantic search for him. It ended when they finally found him atop the roof of the library, trying to figure a way out.

“He climbed over the building to escape. But, after reaching the roof, he realised that he had no way to reach or scale the compound wall,” a jail official said. It, however, is important to note that Rajesh conceived and executed his plan to breakout in less than a week. While individual attempts are too random to predict the success rate, trained personnel of an organisation had better luck in trying to break free.

In the past, there have been many attempts – with different degrees of success – to escape, but none that shook the state police as much as the two by the cadre of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 1995.

The most infamous was the escape from Vellore Fort by a team of suspected LTTE members just days ahead of Independence Day. Forty three such men were being detained at Tipu Mahal inside the Fort – a detention centre rather than a proper prison – mostly for travelling without proper and sufficient documents.

This was a classic prison break attempt, with tunnels, rains and even a power cut to complete the story.

By the time all of them escaped (on August 14, 1995), they had been there for five years, enough to follow the routines and procedures to track a pattern. Using ‘tools’ that they fabricated using bathroom pipes and the steel plates used to serve food, the men dug a 153-feet tunnel that ran about 10 feet under the surface, recalled a police officer. They managed to burrow at a speed of one foot a day, police investigation had found.

Police officers added that it was not clear whether men dug the entire length of the tunnel, or they stumbled across an old, unused drainage. After all, this was an old structure converted into a detention camp, and not a prison. Once outside the walls, they swam across the 50-ft wide moat.

The suspected militants reportedly escaped in teams over three nights, from August 12 to 14. They had managed to fool sentries on three watch towers and more than 20 other staff who were supposed to keep an eye on them. Instances of power cut and rain also seem to have worked in favour of the men.

It was clear that those who were supposed to monitor the detention facility and undertake daily inspections were not doing their duty properly, noted a retired DGP who was in the intelligence wing when the escape happened.

A day after the jail break, on Independence Day, the police tracked and confronted one of the militants. But, he consumed cyanide and died in Mambalam before the police team could take him under custody. Another militant, Gunaseelan, said to be mastermind of the escape, was allegedly allowed to go by a policeman.

In the end, police had limited success. Of the 43 who escaped, 11 were rearrested while the rest reportedly managed to return to the Island nation where they joined the LTTE’s battle against the Sri Lankan forces. 

Though this was the most high-profile escape, it was not the first by the outfit in the same year. Earlier in February, there was another attempt, this time from the Chennai Central Prison – the prison that was functioning across the road from Chennai Central railway station before being shifted to Puzhal outside the city limits. 

Even though 15 inmates were part of the team that grabbed arms from the prison guards and scaled the wall to escape, only 9 managed to escape eventually. Of the rest, three broke their legs while the other three got stuck in Cooum river, recalled a jail officer.

Prison breaks, an idea as old as detention itself, is not usual. In Tamil Nadu itself, there have been more than half dozen jail breaks in the first half of 1990s. But after security mechanism was tightened over the years, the possibility of executing such a plan has become even more audacious to the point of being almost impossible as was proved by Rajesh’s failed attempt to flee.