Delhi High Court Comes Down Heavily On Tihar Jail Authorities For Alleged Murder Of 23-yo Undertrial In Prison

Shreya Agarwal

24 Feb 2021 2:18 PM IST

  • Delhi High Court Comes Down Heavily On Tihar Jail Authorities For Alleged Murder Of 23-yo Undertrial In Prison

    The Delhi High Court today came down heavily on the Delhi state government and Tihar jail authorities while hearing a compensation petition on the alleged murder of a 23-yo undertrial, Dilsher Azad in Delhi's Tihar jail, and directed the Delhi Police to file a status report within 3 days. The court also asked the respondents of the petition, the state of Delhi, the Director General and...

    The Delhi High Court today came down heavily on the Delhi state government and Tihar jail authorities while hearing a compensation petition on the alleged murder of a 23-yo undertrial, Dilsher Azad in Delhi's Tihar jail, and directed the Delhi Police to file a status report within 3 days. The court also asked the respondents of the petition, the state of Delhi, the Director General and the Superintendent, Tihar Jail to clarify whether any FIR and chargesheet have been filed with respect to the incident.

    Noting that the incident was very serious in nature, the court also asked the jail authorities for the relevant CCTV footage of the incident, and observed that in such cases the footage must be seized and confisacted immediately.
    The undertrial youngster, Dilsher Azad had been lodged in Delhi's Tihar jail since Sept 19, 2019, and was allegedly murdered by inmates. Azad's father received information about his son's sudden death in the prison on Nov 30, 2020.
    Azad's father has also alleged that upon reaching the prison he was not informed the real reason for his son's death despite repeated requests, and only got the relevant information once his advocate reached the prison.
    It has been said in the petition that Azad was found dead with knife injuries, specifically 9 wounds on his body.
    On a related note, Single Judge bench of Justice Prathiba Singh hearing the case also pointed out that the time limit for which CCTV footages are stored in Tihar needs to be increased from its current limit.
    She said, "I had visited the Tihar jail once, and they have a very small time limit for which they preserve the CCTV footage. Nowadays we have cloud servers, so the issue with storage space is not there anymore. We should increase the time for storage of CCTV footages."


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