Almost 10 days after the Supreme Court ordered the Punjab government to hand over custody of the gangster-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari to Uttar Pradesh, where he faces several criminal cases, the Punjab Department of the Interior has asked Uttar Pradesh to take custody. of the incarcerated. BSP MLA before April 8.
In a letter to his UP counterpart, Awanish Kumar Awasthi, on April 3, Punjab (Home) Additional Chief Secretary Anurag Agarwal wrote: “… Therefore, it was requested that adequate arrangements be made for the transfer of the prisoner under trial, Mukhtar Ansari, from the district jail, Roopnagar (Ropar) can be done; and said transfer / handover is carried out ”.
He added: “Mukhtar Ansari is also mentioned as having certain medical conditions and these can be taken into account when arranging for his transportation from Roopnagar District Jail to Banda in Uttar Pradesh.”
In a March 26 order, the Supreme Court ordered the Punjab government to hand over custody of Ansari to the Uttar Pradesh government within two weeks.
Meanwhile, UP Police announced that a special team had been formed to take Mukhtar Ansari from Punjab to Banda District Jail.
ADG (Prayagraj) Prem Prakash said the team will depart for Punjab from Chitrakoot on Monday. “We will have a fleet of vehicles for protection and we will make sure that no one contacts him on the way to UP. We have made all preparations to bring him back, ”said ADG, who is overseeing the exercise.
Authorities said special security arrangements had been put in place at the Banda District Jail. “We have increased security at the jail and will closely monitor visitors,” said a senior official.
On Saturday, a five-member UP Police team set out for Punjab to investigate “false documents” from an ambulance used to transport Ansari from Ropar prison to a court in Mohali on March 31. The ambulance had a Barabanki license plate.
Ansari, a history collector in UP police records, is currently in Ropar jail in connection with an extortion case. Punjab police had brought him in in 2019 from a UP prison based on a production order issued approximately fifteen days after the extortion case was registered.
Last October, UP BJP MLA Alka Rai, the wife of former legislator Krishna Nand Rai, sent a letter to Congress Secretary General Priyanka Gandhi Vadra while Ansari was still in Punjab. She accused the congressional government in Punjab of helping Ansari, accused of her husband’s murder in 2005, to evade appearances before the UP.
The Yogi Adityanath government then petitioned the Supreme Court for custody of Ansari and claimed that the Punjab government was “blatantly protecting” the BSP MLA by failing to hand over custody to face trial “in 10 heinous cases of murder, extortion, deception, fraud “and” Acts of gangsters “in the special court for parliamentarians and military of Allahabad.
Cases against the five-time MLA are filed at various police stations in different districts of the UP, including Lucknow, Ghazipur and Mau. Ansari has been acquitted in most of these cases.
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