India jailbreak: Sikh separatist Harminder Singh Mintoo recaptured Published duration 28 November 2016

image copyright AFP image caption The prisoners escaped from a high security prison in Punjab

Police in India say they have recaptured a Sikh separatist leader, who escaped from a prison in Punjab.

Harminder Singh Mintoo was arrested from the main railway station in the capital, Delhi, on Monday, police said.

Armed men sprang Mintoo and five other inmates in a dramatic jailbreak in Patiala district on Sunday.

Mintoo has been called a leader of the outlawed Khalistan Liberation Force, accused of links with armed separatists in Punjab in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Media reports said he had been named as an accused in a case of possession of explosives in 2008, and had a dozen cases registered against him.

"The cases against him were very weak and in most of the cases he is described as the main conspirator. He has not been accused of direct involvement in any alleged militant activity," his lawyer Jaspal Singh Manjhpur told The Indian Express newspaper.

It is the latest in a series of jailbreaks which have embarrassed the authorities in India.

Last month eight prisoners escaped from a high-security jail in the city of Bhopal in central Madhya Pradesh state.

The inmates, members of an outlawed Islamist group, were killed outside Bhopal after they resisted arrest, police said.

Last year, two people escaped from Delhi's maximum security Tihar jail by digging a tunnel under a wall.

In the latest incident early on Sunday, five armed men in police uniform arrived in a car at Nabha prison in Patiala on the "pretext of depositing a prisoner in jail", police said.

"They asked the guard to open the gate. As soon as the gate was opened, they overpowered the guard and entered the jail, resulting in the escape of six prisoners," Punjab police chief Suresh Arora told reporters.

The men escaped in a convoy of vehicles.