Mahender Yadav was lodged at Delhi’s Mandoli Jail and had tested positive for Covid-19 on June 26. (Representational)
Former Delhi MLA and a convict in the 1984 communal riots case Mahender Yadav (70) died due to Covid-related complications at a hospital in the national capital, officials said on Sunday. This is the second case of a Delhi prison inmate succumbing to the virus.
Yadav was lodged at Delhi’s Mandoli Jail and had tested positive for Covid-19 on June 26. Yadav’s family had then shifted him to a private hospital in Dwarka on June 30. On Saturday evening, he died at Akash Healthcare Hospital.
Delhi Prisons DG Sandeep Goel said, “After Yadav was tested positive, he was shifted to DDU Hospital. He complained of breathlessness and had symptoms of heart-related issues. We shifted him to DDU. Later that day, he was referred to Lok Nayak Hospital.”
At Mandoli Jail, Yadav was lodged in Jail no. 14 with Kanwar Singh and 29 other inmates. He was serving a sentence for 10 years. Kanwar Singh, a murder convict, died inside Mandoli Jail on June 15 due to Covid-19. After Singh’s death, other inmates at the barrack were tested for the virus.
DG Goel said that over 17 inmates tested positive but Yadav wasn’t one of them. “The 12 inmates who tested negative were again tested on June 25. A day later, we found that Yadav and two other inmates tested positive. The same day Yadav was taken to the hospital,” he said.
Meanwhile, it has been reported that Yadav and two other convicts filed a plea to get an interim bail after they were infected with the virus in June. However, the Supreme Court denied interim bail to Yadav on July 1.