According to the police sources, the superintendent of Barabanki district jail Umesh Kumar Singh offered a bribe of Rs. fifty thousand to the minister of state for prisons Jai Kumar Singh (above) on Wednesday evening. ANI photo
A senior jail official was booked after he allegedly tried to bribe an Uttar Pradesh minister.
According to the police sources, the superintendent of Barabanki district jail Umesh Kumar Singh offered a bribe of Rs. fifty thousand to the minister of state for prisons Jai Kumar Singh on Wednesday evening.
Sources quoting the minister said that the jail official had reached the official residence of the minister at Dalibagh and asked the minister's personal staff to let him the latter citing an urgent work.
The minister, however, got angry when he found that the official was in an inebriated state and asked him to go from there.
''The jail official then took out an envelope from his pocket and put it on the table...he then left,'' said a police official quoting the minister.
It later turned out that the envelope contained Rs. fifty thousand. The minister then asked his personal staff to lodge a complaint with the police in this regard.
Umesh Singh, however, claimed that he never went to the minister's residence. ''I never met the minister...he won't even recognise me also,'' the jail official alleged.
Police said that a complaint had been lodged in this connection. ''The matter is being investigated,'' said an official.
Overcrowded UP jails are infamous for being safe havens for notorious criminals and there have been several instances of clashes inside the jails between gangs of criminals and the security personnel in the past. An RTI query had recently revealed that there were over 93 thousand prisoners in the jails in UP against an official capacity of 58 thousand.