Bollywood actor Sooraj Pancholi recently made an acting comeback with the film, Kesari Veer, after a long hiatus. In one of his interviews, the actor recalled the time when he was jailed in the Jiah Khan suicide case, and revealed that he was kept in the same prison cell in Mumbai as that of terrorist Ajmal Kasab.
Sooraj told Hindi Rush that the entire episode of him being in jail is "hazy" for him as he was only 21 at that time and did not know how to react. "I was sent to Arthur Road Jail, and put in the anda cell (solitary confinement). I was kept separate, all alone. I was in the same cell where they had put Kasab. They treated me like I’d done a bomb blast," he shared.
He went on to say that he was not even given a pillow and he slept on the newspapers that carried headlines about his case. "They treated me terribly, like I had committed some horrible crime. I am not even exaggerating. It was four or five years later that I understood what exactly I had been through. When it was happening, it all felt like a dream," he stated.
Sooraj also said how a lot of people still don't know that he was given a clean chit in the case by the court. He added that among those who do know, a lot of celebs and common people actually approached him and admitted that they were wrong about him.
For those unversed, it was in April 2023 that Sooraj was acquitted by a CBI Special Court citing lack of evidence, 10 years after Jiah Khan died by suicide in her Mumbai residence.