Uttar Pradesh, India: On April 29, an MP/MLA Court in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghazipur has convicted the jailed gangster-turned-politician and former Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) MLA Mukhtar Ansari. The Court sentenced him to 10 years imprisonment and imposed a Rs 5 lakh fine. The security has been increased in Ghazipur in view of the verdict in the case against the former MLA, his elder brother and BSP MP Afzal Ansari.
The case against the former MLA was registered under the Gangster Act after he was booked for his involvement in kidnapping Nand Kishore Rungta who was a coal industrialist and member of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) in 1996 and the murder of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA Krishnanand Rai in 2005.
Krishnanand Rai was an MLA from Muhammadabad and was close to Manoj Sinha, who was a minister for five years in a Union Government from 2014-2019. Afzal Ansari defeated Manoj Sinha to become the MP of Ghazipur.
The killing of Krishnanand Rai in November 2005 was one of the most sensational political murders in history. Krishnanand Rai was killed along with six of his other companions in the mayhem. Unfazed by the regime, the killers fired a total of 400 bullets. After the post-mortem, 67 bullets were discovered and extracted from the bodies of the deceased.
Mukhtar Ansari’s Prior Convictions
It is pertinent to note that a Ghazipur Court convicted Mukhtar Ansari and his aide Bhim Singh in a 26-year-old Gangster Case in December 2022. It is also pertinent to note that this was the third case where Mukhtar Ansari was convicted.
In September 2022, the Allahabad High Court convicted him in two cases, in one case the HC found the former MLA guilty of intimidating a jailer wherein he abused the jailer and pointed a revolver pistol at him, and threatened to kill him in 2003. In another case, the HC convicted the former MLA to 5 years imprisonment in a 23-year-old case under the Gangster Act.
Case Against Mukhtar Ansari’s Sons for Enemy Properties
Earlier on April 14, the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad high court rejected the anticipatory bail application of Umar Ansari, the son of gangster-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari in a case related to enemy property. The court passed the order on April 13. In this case, an FIR was lodged at Hazratganj police station here in August 2020.
The bench also dismissed a plea of Mukhtar’s other son Abbas Ansari, who is an MLA from Mau (Sadar), seeking a quashing of the chargesheet in the same case. The case is related to the enemy property in the Jiamau area in the state capital which Mukhtar Ansari and his two sons had fraudulently acquired.
The land belonged to one Mohammad Waseem, who migrated to Pakistan after the Partition of India. Thereafter, this property was registered as enemy property in the records of the state government. The court observed that despite being aware of the fact that it was an enemy property, Mukhtar Ansari and his sons used their influence and resorted to fraudulent means to get the property registered in their names.
