Burail Jail escape: four undertrials tunnel out

Who: Jagtar Singh Hawara, Jagtar Singh Tara and Paramjit Singh Bheora, three men on trial for the 1995 assassination of Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh, and Devi Singh, their cook, who was himself a murder accused from Garhwal.

What: In the early hours of 22 January 2004 the four got out of Barrack No. 7 of the Model Jail at Burail through a tunnel that ran under three walled security rings. The Tribune's first report put it at 94 feet; later Tribune reports give 104 and 109 feet. It was about two and a half feet wide. The mouth sat in Hawara's cell under the backrest of a chair, and the far end came up in a field under a wooden board on which carrots were grown. The men ran a tap around the clock to soften the soil and cover the noise, disposed of the earth through the toilet, bathroom and kitchen, and kept about 40 bags of it behind curtains. The tunnel exit was noticed at about 7 am and word reached officials at about 8:15. Police called it the third suspected digging attempt, after earlier ones in 1998 and 2002. Five jail officials were booked and suspended.

Hawara was arrested in Delhi on 8 June 2005, after the Delhi twin blasts of 22 May (The Tribune, 9 June). On 7 July a Delhi court gave Chandigarh Police custody; The Tribune's 2015 report quotes police records dating his arrest to 7 July. Bheora was arrested on 23 March 2006 after an exchange of fire on GT Karnal Road. Tara stayed at large for eleven years, until he was arrested in Thailand on the evening of Monday 5 January 2015 (Pattaya Mail, 8 January 2015; The Tribune's report of 19 March 2015 gives 7 January) and sent back to India. Devi Singh was never found. In August 2015 a Chandigarh magistrate convicted Hawara and Bheora under Sections 120B and 224 of the Indian Penal Code, ruled that the time they had already served was their sentence, and acquitted 14 others, including five jail officials. In March 2018 a Chandigarh court sentenced Tara to life until natural death for the assassination of Beant Singh.

Where: The Model Jail at Burail, Chandigarh.

Why it mattered: Three men accused of killing a sitting Chief Minister walked out of a high-security jail through a tunnel that, the Tribune reported, had been dug from inside over at least a year. The trial of those accused of helping the escape ran for over 260 hearings and ended only in 2015. The episode still shadows Hawara's case. In September 2024, hearing his plea to be moved from Tihar Jail to a Punjab jail, Justice B R Gavai asked how such a tunnel could be dug in a jail.