Bollywood superstar Sanjay Dutt, who is in jail for arms possession, is being held in a cell built for militants where he cannot see daylight and wants to be transferred, a report said on Saturday. Dutt, 53, surrendered on Thursday to serve out the remaining three-and-a-half years of a five-year term in a case linked to the deadly 1993 Mumbai bombings. Dutt’s lawyer, Rizwan Merchant, has demanded the transfer of the actor whom he said was being kept in the cell once occupied by Mumbai attacks gunman Ajmal Kasab, according to the Indian Express daily newspaper. Kasab was executed last November, nearly four years after 166 people died in a three-day rampage in Mumbai. The steel bunker specially built for Kasab at Mumbai’s Arthur Road Jail had no ventilation and the actor could not even tell if it was day or night, the lawyer said. “He (Dutt) is not a terrorist,” and should not be kept in such a cell, the lawyer was quoted as saying. The actor, whose parents were two of India’s biggest stars, shot to fame in the 1980s in a string of action movies in which he performed his own stunts, earning him the nickname “Deadly Dutt”.
He was convicted in 2006 of possessing guns supplied by gangsters who staged the 1993 bomb attacks that killed 257 people but was freed on bail after serving 18 months in prison. In March, the Supreme Court upheld Dutt’s conviction. He was cleared in 2007 of more serious conspiracy charges in the blasts, believed staged by Muslim underworld leaders in revenge for religious riots in which largely Muslims died after the razing of an ancient mosque by Hindu extremists. Dutt, whose mother was Muslim and father Hindu, was found guilty of possession of an automatic rifle and a pistol which he insisted were only meant to protect his family in Mumbai’s charged atmosphere following the mosque’s destruction. After the Supreme Court upheld his conviction, the father-of-three wept and declared himself “a shattered man”.
