PESHAWAR, June 2: District and Sessions Judge Shahjehan Khan Akhundzada has directed judicial officers to complete within three months the trial of prisoners who have been behind bars for more than six months.

The judge issued the directive after a surprise visit to the Peshawar central prison where inmates complained of lengthy trials and some of them saying that they had been behind bars for more than five years.

He asked the additional district and sessions judges to adopt ‘coercive’ measures to ensure presence of prosecution witnesses at hearings and discourage adjournment of cases on flimsy grounds.

Jail Superintendent Khalid Abbas informed the judge during the visit a few days back that there were 2,339 prisoners in the prison against its capacity of 1,180 prisoners.

Sixty of the prisoners are on the death row, 586 male and 17 female prisoners are serving rigorous imprisonment, 49 prisoners are serving simple imprisonment, 500 male and 12 female prisoners are under trial with sessions court, and 1,040 male and 52 female detainees are ordinary under-trial prisoners.

In his report, Mr Akhundzada also said that a considerable number of foreign prisoners had been waiting to be deported to their native countries. He asked the officer in charge of the special branch to deport within a fortnight all those foreigners whose deportation orders had been issued.

Several old people complained that they had been lodged in jail under the Frontier Crimes Regulation with no fault of theirs. They said they were summoned for a jirga by political authorities and when they reached the venue of the jirga they were taken into custody.

The judge expressed concern over the sanitation situation in jail. He found that four out of five prisoners in Chakki No 4 had been suffering from scabies.

He requested the director health to send doctors to the central jail on a monthly basis to take care of prisoners’ health.