Actor Sanjay Dutt, who surrendered on Thursday before the TADA court in Mumbai, spent his first night of three-and-a-half year jail journey sentence inside the transfer barrack of the Arthur Road Jail. He is likely to be shifted to Pune’s Yerawada Prison in the early ours of Saturday, sources said.
The roads leading to the Arthur Road Jail were on Friday chock-a-block with OB vans of TV channels, as reporters kept a watch on every police van coming out of the prison compound.
It was reported in a section of the electronic media that the actor was lodged in an “anda (solitary)” cell or “Kasab’s cell.” Jail officers, however, denied the reports and confirmed that Dutt spent the night at the transfer or transit barrack.
The Arthur Road Jail primarily houses undertrials. In its “Long Yard,” there is a transit barrack comprising seven cells where a maximum of 30 people can be lodged.
Dutt was lodged in the transit barrack along with other convicts in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case who surrendered on Thursday. However, identities of the inmates who shared the cell with Dutt were not known.
Timing not known
Jail authorities were tight-lipped about the timing of his transfer to the Yerawada Jail as the actor had earlier moved the court apprehending threat to his life and sought to keep the electronic media at bay. Grapevine has it that the actor would be shifted after Friday midnight.
On Thursday, though the court had turned down his request to be allowed to smoke inside the jail, it gave a clearance for home-made food for one month. The dabbawalla brought him home-made food in a tiffin and and handed it over to the guards at the jail gates on Friday noon.