Wife of murder accused supplies dope in prison

The wife of a jailed murder accused became a drug peddler to support her family. But she didn’t sell it to students or youths but to prisoners.

The woman, identified as Chaitra, was caught with several packets of marijuana in the visitors’ gallery of the central prison at Parappana Agrahara recently. The dope weighed around 550 grams. Her arrest helped officials bust an elaborate drug supply racket in the state’s largest prison.

The racket was the brainchild of Chaitra’s husband, Murugesh, who has been incarcerated on a murder charge for the past year. She regularly visited him along with their three-year-old daughter.

During one such visit, Murugesh told her about the high demand for marijuana in the prison. He asked her to procure the contraband and give it to him during her prison visits.

Murugesh would tell his wife where to procure the drug and when to bring it to the prison. Most of the time, he received it directly from her and sold it inside the prison. Sometimes he asked her to directly deliver to other prisoners. The money made Chaitra financially independent, and she would give some of it to her husband.

On Tuesday, she came to the prison to deliver marijuana to an undertrial named Hemanth on the instructions of her husband. She had procured the drug from two bike-borne men who asked her to deliver it to Hemanth.

S V Yallappa, a Karnataka State Industrial Security Force inspector posted at the prison, caught Chaitra with the drug. He informed the jurisdictional Parappana Agrahara police. S Babu, a sub-inspector from the police station, rushed to the prison and arrested her.

Police have booked Chaitra, her husband, 10 other prisoners who received the contraband and two unidentified men who supplied the drug.