MUMBAI, India – Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt returned to prison Monday, just two months after he was released on bail, to resume serving a six-year sentence for illegal weapons possession.
Judge Pramod Kode issued sentencing papers to Dutt, who handed himself over to authorities immediately.
"The Supreme Court said I should surrender after I get a copy of the court order, so I am surrendering," Dutt told a special court in Mumbai that was set up to deal with cases connected to a 1993 bombing that killed 257 people in the western India city.
Dutt was sentenced to six years in prison on July 31 for possessing three automatic rifles and a pistol that had been supplied to him by men subsequently convicted in the 1993 bombing.
He was held at Yerwada Prison in Pune, a city near Mumbai, but released on Aug. 22 on a technicality because the court had still not issued sentencing papers. The delay occurred because the judgment, which ran to 4,340 pages, needed to be issued to all 100 people convicted in the case.
Dutt is appealing his sentence in the Supreme Court.
The actor's case was part of a sprawling Mumbai bombings trial that has dragged on for 12 years. He maintains he knew nothing about the bomb plot and asked for the guns to protect his family — his mother was Muslim, and his father, Hindu — after receiving threats during sectarian riots in Mumbai.
He was acquitted of more serious terrorism and conspiracy charges.
Dutt, the son of a famous Bollywood family, has starred in over 100 films, more than half of them made after he was originally arrested on suspicion of involvement in the bombings.
In recent years his popularity has soared, peaking in 2006 when he starred in "Lage Raho Munnabhai," or "Keep at it, Munnabhai," the top-grossing Bollywood film so far this decade.
In it Dutt plays a lovable thug trying to follow the teachings of Indian pacifist Mohandas K. Gandhi with hilarious results.
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