Lucknow: Gangster-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari was convicted in a case under the Gangsters Act of 2007 by a Ghazipur MP/MLA court and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The case was registered two years after the murder of BJP leader Krishnanand Rai in 2005, in which he was acquitted four years earlier.
As per preliminary information, the court has also imposed a fine on Mukhtar and is set to pronounce its verdict on Bhai Afzal Ansari, the sitting Bahujan Samaj Party MP from Ghazipur, who is currently out on bail.,
If he is sentenced to jail for more than two years, he will lose his Lok Sabha membership.
Case in which MLA was five times Mukhtar was convicted in 2007 after the Ghazipur police registered a case under the stringent Uttar Pradesh Gangster and Anti-Social Activities (Prevention) Act, 1986. It was registered on the basis of several other criminal cases in which the Ansari brothers were allegedly involved. Riots, including Rai’s assassination and the 1977 kidnapping and murder of Nand Kishore Rungta, a coal baron and office-bearer of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad unit of Varanasi.
The case was registered on the basis of the gang chart prepared by the Ghazipur police.
This is not his first conviction in recent times. In December 2022, he was sentenced to 10 years’ rigorous imprisonment (RI) and fined Rs 50,000 in another Gangster Act case registered in 1999 at Lucknow’s Hazratganj police.
In September 2022, the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court sentenced him to seven years in prison for threatening a jailer.
Rai’s nephew Anand Rai is relieved after Saturday’s verdict.
“I thank the court with all my heart. I thank you sirYes (CM Yogi Adityanath) who has made this state fear-free with the policy of zero tolerance. In the previous governments, these goons and mafia were torturing the people and their only occupation was to extort money from the public. Today they are being annihilated. Today, they are either in jail or up (dead),” he told the media.
read this also, Gang lords like Atiq are routinely killed in UP – this only reinforces ‘long-lived’ mafia tradition
Krishnanand Rai murder case
It is important to note that four years after the acquittal of Mukhtar and Afzal in Rai’s murder, the Delhi CBI court sentenced Mukhtar and Afzal citing hostile witnesses.
Rai, the sitting BJP MLA from the Mohammadabad constituency, was shot dead in the evening November 29, 2005, when he was returning from Siyari where he had gone to inaugurate a cricket match.
According to reports, he had gone there without his bulletproof vehicle and security guard, despite warnings from the Special Task Force of Uttar Pradesh about a possible threat to his life.
According to media reports, a group of attackers opened fire on him with automatic rifles. Six other people had died in the incident.
The murder sparked political outrage, with senior BJP leaders such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee, LK Advani, Rajnath Singh and Manoj Sinha demanding a CBI inquiry.
Speaking to the media ahead of the verdict on Saturday, Krishnanand Rai’s wife Alka Rai told mediapersons that the matter pertains to the court and she will respect its verdict, whatever it may be.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)