New Delhi: A special court in Lucknow on Monday (January 30) sentenced 30-year-old Ahmed Murtaza Abbasi to death. Abbasi had been convicted for attacking and injuring two police constables with a sharp weapon while trying to enter the Goraknath temple in Gorakhpur in April last year.
The head of the temple is Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath.
Vivekanand Sharan Tripathi, special judge of the anti-terror squad court, also imposed a Rs 44,000 fine on Abbasi.
Tripathi had earlier heard the case for 60 continuous days and convicted Abbasi under Sections 121 (waging, or attempting to wage war, or abetting waging of war, against the Government of India) and 307 (attempt to murder) of the Indian Penal Code, LiveLaw reported.
Prashant Kumar, additional director-general of police, said: “Abbasi got capital punishment under Section 121 of the IPC and life term under Section 307. The case was heard regularly in the last 60 days.”
According to the FIR filed in April 2022, Abbasi had tried to enter the temple on April 3, 2022 and attacked the security personnel deployed there with a sickle, injuring two Provincial Armed Constabulary constables, Gopal Gaur and Anil Paswan. He was overpowered by the security personnel at the spot and later arrested, according to NDTV.
Abbasi is an Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay graduate.
UP DGP Devendra Singh Chauhan told the Indian Express that the death sentence was awarded due to “effective work by the ATS prosecution wing”.
The Uttar Pradesh police had earlier said that Abbasi had been trained by ISIS and was in direct contact with terrorists and terrorist sympathisers. “He was ISIS’s lone wolf and an expert in terror financing. He was involved in spreading terror literature in electronic format and was in touch with ISIS people,” DGP Chauhan said.
According to the Indian Express, Abbasi’s father Muneer Ahmed had said during the trial that his son was undergoing treatment for depression and “not well since around 2017”.
Under Indian law, the death sentence is awarded only in the “rarest of rare” cases. In recently released data from Project 39A, it was revealed that the year 2022 saw 165 death sentences handed out by trial courts – the highest in over two decades.