LAHORE, Nov 1: The provincial prisons minister on Saturday transferred a deputy superintendent of the Camp Jail, who was found guilty of torturing a number of prisoners and shifting them to small (torture) cells from ordinary barracks. The official has been sent to a small district jail as punishment.

Besides, seven other officials, three of them assistant superintendents of the same jail, were transferred to different district prisons on charges of torture and corruption.

A handout issued here said Punjab Minister for Prisons Chaudhry Abdul Ghafoor paid a visit to the jail early in the morning and listened to the inmates -- Jafar, Qurban, Latif, Hamid and Ali Askari – all of them alleged inhuman treatment and corruption by the officials.

The minister ordered transfer of DS Abdul Razzaq Niazi to Rajanpur jail and assistant superintendents Farrukh Rasheed, Ahsan Cheema and Ali Akbar, head warders Ghazanfar Ali and Muhammad Boota and warders Siddique Goraya and Muhammad Ramzan to other prisons in the province.

A prisons department official told Dawn that the minister reached the jail around 7:30 in the morning while acting on some written complaints of the prisoners. He met a patient Saeed who was admitted to Bed No 14 of the jail hospital from Chakki No 6 (small cell) with fractured leg. Saeed got his leg fractured when the jail officials tortured him.

The minister assured the victim of proper medical treatment and reprimanded DS Razzaq Niazi for torturing him without any justification. Saeed, who was shifted from Block-4 to the Chakki No 6 was tortured when he sought justification for his transfer to the small cell.

The minister, who had also received a letter from two other prisoners, Jafar and Daud, that DS Razzaq Niazi had abused and tortured them for raising objection over the transfer of their fellow prisoner Mukhtar from a barrack to Kasuri Chakki (small cell), visited them and expressed sympathy.

They alleged that the DS also got them stripped in front of others. During the visit, the minister found that the two inmates were tortured with blood spots on their body parts.

The official said a number of prisoners complained to the minister that the current administration had made their lives miserable and their shifting from ordinary jails to small cells had become a routine practice for no fault of theirs.

The minister got annoyed over the inmates’ torture and corruption by the jail officials did not allow IG prisons Mian Farooq Nazir and Jail Superintendent Gulzar Butt to accompany him to the prison. He also took strict notice of recovery of cell phones from the possession of NAB prisoners, including Shoaib Qureshi, Babar Kharal, Double Shah, Chaudhry Zulfikar and Amir Dar.

He questioned the jail staff as to why these influential prisoners managed to get cell phones.

The minister told Dawn that he had visited the jail without informing the officials to check fresh complaints regarding maltreatment and corruption by the officials, confirming the torture of the inmates he talked to.