Sanjay Dutt released

Pune, Aug 23 (IANS) A beaming Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt walked out of the Yerawada Jail here early Thursday, 21 nights after a TADA court sent him to prison for possessing weapons given by the accused in the 1993 Mumbai bombings.

Dutt, 48, was wearing a white striped shirt and blue jeans and sported short cropped hair as he stepped out of the prison gates at 7.15 a.m. accompanied by his lawyer Satish Mane Shinde, who had arrived some two hours earlier.

Visibly happy that he was out of jail, Dutt shook hands with the policemen outside the prison complex and even hugged a constable.

He then waved to the small media contingent that had been camping outside the prison gates since overnight before speeding off in a car to the airport to catch a flight to Mumbai.

'He looked extremely happy,' an IANS correspondent reported from the site.

At the Pune airport, his brother in law and actor Kumar Gaurav joined him and they took off to Mumbai after a minor tiff with journalists who insisted on speaking to Dutt.

Dutt was moved to the Yerawada Jail Aug 2 after the TADA court sentencing. On Monday, the Supreme Court granted him conditional bail but the court papers were struck at the Mumbai TADA court until Thursday morning.

Pune jail officials said that although they start functioning only from 10 a.m., they decided to let go Dutt early in the morning since otherwise they would have to deal with huge crowds.