Chandigarh, Jan 24: HAD a Bollywood film shown a jailbreak as improbable as the one which took place at Burail on Thursday, it would have been accused of extreme exaggeration. But real life has proved to be stranger than reel life and one cannot help shaking one's head in disbelief. Whether it was a case of laxity or complicity will be determined by the officials who should have prevented it in the first place. From the sheer ease with which the alleged killers of Beant Singh nonchalantly crawled to their freedom, one cannot help suspecting collusion. Digging a 94-ft-long tunnel and disposing off the truckloads of soil that would have been pulled out in the process could have taken months, if not years, and it is incredible that none of the jail authorities got wind of it. They seemed to have tightly shut their eyes when all this was happening right under their feet. To cap it all, the three alleged assassins had already made two other attempts to escape from the jail.
Even the material comforts provided to the top-security prisoners defy imagination. They not only had a TV in their room, which remained on till 3 am on the fateful night, a weightlifting rod to dig the tunnel and a curtain for the almirah in which they hid some of the bags of soil removed from the tunnel but also a man to cook their food, a murder accused who escaped along with them.
However, to argue that all this could not have been accomplished without the help of an official accomplice will be underestimating the bumbling capacity of the security agencies. The manhunt for the missing terrorists was launched several hours after the escape was noticed. Even then, the policemen who dutifully put up barricades did not even have the photographs of the men they were looking for. If this can happen in the case of the killers of a Chief Minister, one can well imagine the sharpness of the eyes on the lookout for lesser criminals.