Mukhtar Ansari was on Saturday sentenced to 10 years of rigorous imprisonment in a 2007 case registered under Gangster Act. Ghazipur’s MP-MLA court also order the gangster-politician to pay a fine of Rs 5 lakh.
His elder brother and BSP MP from Ghazipur Afzal Ansari was also convicted and sentenced to four years in jail with Rs 1 lakh fine.
The verdict is extremely crucial for Afzal as conviction means losing the Lok Sabha seat. Earlier in the day, tight security was put in place outside the Ghazipur court as it prepared to pronounce its verdict in a kidnapping and murder case against the Ansari brothers.
According to a leading national daily, Mukhtar was booked for his involvement in coal tycoon and Vishwa Hindu Parishad office-bearer Nandkishore Rungta kidnapping case of 1996 and BJP MLA Krishnanand Rai murder case of 2005.
His brother’s name was included in the gang chart prepared following Krishnanad Rai murder case. Mukhtar and his close aide Bhim Singh are already lodged in Banda jail after they were sentenced to 10-year rigorous punishment along with a fine of Rs 5 lakh each in another case of Gangster Act lodged against the duo in 1996.
On Thursday, the income tax department’s Lucknow unit served a notice to ganglord in the jail. A report in The Times of India stated that that the notice pertains to the I-T department’s recent proceedings in which Mukhtar’s benami property worth Rs 12 crore was attached.
The report quoted I-T sources as saying that 23 more benami properties belonging to Mukhtar have been traced by them. Sources told TOI that a property in Ghazipur was found to be registered in the name of Mukhtar’s employee, Ganesh Dutt Mishra. So far, property worth Rs 290 crore has been attached of Mukhtar and his accomplices from across the state.
According to an OpIndia report, Ansari had also grabbed the land of Hindu shrines. The report stated that he occupied 4.60 acres of land belonging to a 125-year-old Hindu temple at Dakshin Tola under Sadar tehsil in Mau.
Social activist Chhotelal Gandhi had filed a complaint at a police station in 2016, in this regard. “In 2016, the then MLA Mukhtar Ansari in the presence of 50,000 people laid the foundation stone of Ansari University. He also started occupying land worth about Rs 15 crore adjacent to it belonging to Thakur ji (the Hindu deity – Vishnu). When I came to know about this, I wrote a letter to all the officers in this regard. When no action was taken, in May 2016, I staged a sit-in protest continuously for seven days," he was quoted as saying.
Earlier in January this year, the police registered a murder case against Mukhtar Ansari in connection to the 2001 ‘Usri Chatti’ gang war incident. A case under section 302 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) was registered against Ansari at PS Mohammadabad in Ghazipur.
On January 18, Allahabad High Court dismissed the March 15 order of the Ghazipur MP/MLA Court, which allowed Ansari to be kept in a superior-class jail in Banda.
While giving the order, the court had said the order of the special court is without jurisdiction, and gangster, dreaded criminal ‘Bahubali’ Ansari is not legally entitled to get a superior class in jail.
