Chennai, January 22: The Prison Advisory Board (PAB), constituted by the Tamil Nadu government following the plea made by a group of life convicts who had served imprisonment for over 14 years at the Vellore Central Prison, including three plotters of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, is expected to submit its report to the government by this weekend.
District Collector C Rajendran, who is the chairman of the PAB, said the board had listened to the pleas made by the life convicts, including that of Nalini Sriharan, Robert Pias and Jayakumar on Wednesday as per the norms prescribed by PAB.
The other eight persons serving life term and whose pleas were placed before the board are: Arjunan, Govindaswamy, Ilavendiran, Devaraj, Pandurangan, Vinayagam, Elumalai and Rajan.
The meeting of the PAB did create ripples in the media circle since it included the release of the Rajiv’s assassins.
While an earlier sitting of the PAB in 2006 had rejected similar plea by them, Nalini took up the issue once again with the High Court to form the Advisory Board besides pressurising the State government by observing a fast in September last year.
The Collector said the five-member board comprising chief judicial magistrate Kalaiarasan, regional probation officers Krishna Namagiri and Beullah Emmanuel and Prison Ssuperintendent N Sekar, besides himself had spent nearly four hours, by taking up the individual cases of all the 11 convicts in the prison.
Though six members were nominated for the board, one member Susheela did not participate in the sitting. The board first held the sitting in the Men’s prison for nearly three hours before going over to the Women’s prison to interact with Nalini. While the Collector refused to divulge the details of the interaction with the convicts, he added that reports were being prepared and submitted to the government `in a day or two’.
He also dismissed media reports that the board had ‘considered’ the pleas of the convicts, giving an impression that the “Rajiv assassination plotters may be freed prematurely”. “It is for the government to decide whether to consider the premature release of the convicts in question,” he further said.
—Agencies