New Delhi: A Varanasi court on Monday convicted jailed gangster-politician Mukhtar Ansari in the 1991 murder of Congress leader Awadhesh Rai.
Rai was shot dead on 3 August that year in front of the Varanasi house of his brother and former Congress MLA Ajay Rai.
Ajay Rai had named Mukhtar Ansari, Bhim Singh and former MLA Abdul Kalim, in the first information report (FIR).
The special MP/MLA Court had concluded hearing on 19 May and reserved order in the 32-year-old case.
A former five-time MLA from Uttar Pradesh’s Mau, Ansari has been in jail for nearly 17 years related to over 60 cases of murder, land-grabbing and extortion.
His convictions only began last year, with Rai’s murder being the fifth case in which he was found guilty.
In 2022, Uttar Pradesh’s courts meted out three convictions to Ansari.
On 21 September, the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court convicted and sentenced him for threatening jailer S.K. Awasthi and pointing a pistol at him. In 2023, Lucknow district prison jailer Awasthi complained that he had been threatened after he ordered a search on Ansari’s visitors to prison.
On 23 September, the Lucknow bench again sentenced him to five years in a case registered in 1999 under the Gangsters Act. The court also imposed a fine of Rs 50,000 in this 23-year-old case.
On 15 December last year, Ansari and his aide Bhim Singh were sentenced to 10 years by the Gazipur Gangster Court in five cases related to murder and attempted to murder.
The fourth conviction came on 29 April this year, when Ghazipur’s MP/MLA Court sentenced him to 10 years in connection with a Gangsters Act case from 2007.
This case was registered two years after the 2005 murder of BJP leader Krishnanand Rai, in which Ansari was acquitted four years ago.
Earlier in January this year, the police registered a murder case against the 59-year-old in connection to the 2001 “Usri Chatti” gang war incident that killed three.