Prison talk: Communication made easy

Smuggling of phones into prisons rampant; funds for mobile jammers continue to lapse.

KARACHI:

There are no cell phone jammers in jails across the country because of a bottleneck at an inter-ministerial committee headed by the federal IT and telecom secretary in Islamabad, which repeatedly refuses to give the go-ahead, The Express Tribune has learnt.

In some cases, even though the provincial prison budgets had set aside money for the installation of mobile phone jammers, the funds were allowed to lapse because the required No Objection Certificate (NOC) never came through despite repeated requests by jail authorities.

Potentially, all high profile terrorists and suspects, including Salmaan Taseer’s assassin Mumtaz Qadri, CIA agent Raymond Davis, Daniel Pearl’s killer Omar Shiekh and nabbed Taliban commanders in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa jails are networking with their cohorts via smuggled mobile phones, while sitting comfortably in their prison cells.

Jail authorities admit that due to widespread corruption, smuggling of phones is rampant in prisons. They argue that the best and perhaps the only way to deal with the problem is to have jammers installed, at least in those prisons where high profile convicts are being kept.

“I fail to understand what the problem of the federal secretary is given that the provincial jail authorities would be paying for the jammers from their own budget,” says IG Prisons Sindh Ghulam Qadir Thebo.

Smaller provinces ignored?

There are 20 jails in Sindh. None of them have jammers installed despite the case of notorious terrorist Omar Saeed Shiekh, who in November, 2006, had placed hoax calls to President Asif AIi Zardari and Army Chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani while being incarcerated in Hyderabad jail. Shiekh posed as the Indian foreign minister and threatened Pakistan with war in retaliation for the Mumbai attacks. He used a smuggled British origin SIM and cell phone.

“But despite this high profile case which almost brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war, we still have not got the clearance for jammers,” laments Thebo, whose grant of Rs80 million from last year for jammers has lapsed and he is currently facing a shortage of funds to finance even basic expenditures for his prisons.

Home Department official Sahibzada Fazlurahim says the situation is similar in the 22 jails in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

It’s the same story in Balochistan, where funds of Rs8 million for jammers in the province’s 11 prisons are set to lapse, said Home Department official Mohammad Hussain Kakar.

The situation in Punjab is interesting. “Jammers haven’t been installed in any of the 32 jails in Punjab. The problem is not the funds but the NOC from the federal authorities, specifically the IT and telecom secretary,” says DIG prisons Punjab Saliq Jalal.

Federal Secretary IT and Telecom Saeed Ahmad Khan said that jammers were not being used in any jail in Pakistan. He, however, said that according to the files available in his record, his predecessor had allowed jammers to be used only in one instance in Lahore’s Kot Lakhpat jail in 2010.

When asked why other provinces were not given that privilege back then, he said “the use of jammers in one prison in Lahore was a special case which was specifically asked by authorities due to certain reasons I can not disclose over the phone.”

Indecisive committee

The federal secretary said the government had empowered a high powered inter-ministerial committee, which includes the ministry of defence to decide all requests for installation of jammers on a ‘case by case basis’. Representatives of intelligence agencies are part of this committee, a source said.

“The committee is yet to decide anything on this issue, but we will be calling another meeting soon to resolve the matter,” Khan said.

The IT secretary rejected the allegation by jail authorities that a strong lobby in the telecom sector is greasing the palms of the committee members to oppose the widespread use of jammers. “The issue with jammers is that it can spill over in neighborhoods near the jails and affect services of mobile phone operators,” Khan said.

IG Prisons Sindh says if spillover is the only concern then it can be easily resolved since there is massive space in jails and one can control the frequency of the jammers. “Also, how come jammers are being used at chief minister, prime minister and president houses without any issue?” says Thebo.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 13^th, 2011.