Selfies of Basti jail inmates found on Facebook; probe on

Jailor Anil Sudhakar said: “On Thursday evening, a local resident told me about photographs of jail premises being uploaded on Facebook… It was undertrial Vishal Upadhyay’s account. After scanning the pictures, we found that the area seen in the background of the pictures was where the prisoners meet visitors in the jail.” (Representational image)

SELFIES of a jailed undertrial and two murder convicts, along with one person out on bail — taken inside the Basti District Jail — was uploaded on Facebook on Thursday, prompting the police to order a probe into the matter. The photographs were uploaded in the Facebook account of undertrial Vishal Upadhyay, who is currently lodged at the jail with murder convicts Mohammad Arif and Rakesh Tiwari. The fourth person in the selfies, Akhilesh Pandey, was released from the jail on bail about a month ago. While Upadhyay was lodged in jail three months ago under Arms Act, the murder convicts had been in prison for five years, said police.

Jail officials, however, denied that they had found any cellphone from the three prisoners during a search after the matter came to light. Additional Inspector General (Prison) Sharad Kulshrestha said Gorakhpur DIG (Prisons) Yadvendra Shukla will probe the matter and submit a report at the earliest. “Action will be taken on the basis of the findings,” Kulshrestha added.

Jailor Anil Sudhakar said: “On Thursday evening, a local resident told me about photographs of jail premises being uploaded on Facebook… It was undertrial Vishal Upadhyay’s account. After scanning the pictures, we found that the area seen in the background of the pictures was where the prisoners meet visitors in the jail.”

“We immediately questioned Vishal… He claimed that the selfies were clicked around a year ago when he was lodged in the jail in another case. He also claimed that he does not remember who had brought the cellphone to the jail and was unaware how the pictures got uploaded on his Facebook account,” he added.  The jailor said that the murder convicts have claimed that they did not know when the photographs were clicked.