By the end of the day, the police had succeeded in arresting the escaped prisoner and his accomplices. But that there was an escape is a matter of concern, and it exposes the lax security by the escort cell of the Police Department, as the get away occurred when the prisoner was being brought back from the hospital. Everything points to this being a planned break out, and a brazen one at that. Not only did the undertrial break the handcuffs by which he was attached to the constable, but he had accomplices waiting for him, there was pepper sprayed at the escort team, and later even shots were fired at the constable. This also indicates that there was possibly some leak from the Colvale jail as otherwise there was no way that the accomplices could have been waiting for the undertrial outside the district hospital to help him make his escape.
This is not the first escape of a prisoner and possibly will not be the last. In August this year a prisoner had escaped while on garbage duty at Colvale Jail, and a month later another prisoner had gone missing from the jail. These are recent incidents and following the escapes security was to be tightened at the jail, but it is now apparent that tightening of the security has not happened. The current escape, though it did not happen from the jail premises but from the district hospital, however, indicates that the authorities are simply not on the ball when it comes to securing the prisoners.
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There is a long history of escapes from prison in Goa, and one incident of two years ago in December 2018, is relevant to the current escape, as it had resulted in a dreaded prisoner escaping. The Police Department had at that time claimed that it was treating the case on priority, that it was leaving no stone unturned to get the escaped prisoner back behind bars, but two years later Ishwar Makhwan, the prime accused in the Betalbatim rape case is still at large. At least in the current escape, the police succeeded in nabbing the escaped prisoner within 24 hours of the breakout.
To recall, the Betalbatim rape case was a horrific crime and Makhwan, along with his companions, was accused of raping a girl in front of her boyfriend and filming the crime to use the footage to blackmail the victim. The crime had shocked Goa. Prime accused Makhwan had a dark history in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, with eight rapes, 12 robberies and three murders, including a double murder. Besides, that had not been his first time in Goa, but he had been in this State earlier too and was alleged to have committed some petty crimes. The Goa Police has not yet managed to re-arrest him, so he still remains at large.
There are a few similarities in the two escapes, which need to be considered when fine tuning security systems in the prison and for prisoners. In the 2018 escape, Makhwan, a native of Madhya Pradesh, was admitted to the TB Hospital and escaped after almost two weeks there. The undertrial who escaped on December 29, Vivek Gautam, is a native of Uttar Pradesh, was arrested for a dacoity, and escaped from escort police custody when he was being brought back from the hospital, where he had been taken following complaints of stomach pain and vomiting. The fact that the escapes were from hospitals, indicates that the prisoners are aware that this is when security is lax, and have taken advantage of this to get away. It is here that the authorities need to plug the loopholes.
