New Delhi: A day after the former MP and MLA Atiq Ahmed was brought from Sabarmati Jail to Uttar Pradesh’s Prayagraj amidst dramatic media coverage, he was sentenced to rigorous life imprisonment by an MP-MLA court in an abduction case on Tuesday. The court also ordered the same punishment for Dinesh Pasi and Khan Saulat Hanif and imposed a Rs 5,000 fine on all three. All the other seven accused, including Ahmed’s brother Ashraf, were acquitted.
The abduction case goes back to July 2007, when Ahmed and his aides were accused of kidnapping and torturing Umesh Pal, who was the primary witness in a murder case in which Ahmed was allegedly involved. Umesh Pal and two of his bodyguards were murdered in broad daylight in Allahabad in February this year, leading to a huge uproar in the UP assembly. Ahmed is also the main accused in the murder of Umesh Pal.
Umesh Pal was the primary witness in the 2005 murder case of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) MLA Raju Pal, who had defeated Ahmed in the assembly elections. Umesh Pal had accused Raju Pal’s political rival Ahmed of the murder. Since then Umesh Pal was allegedly under threat.
Umesh Pal had alleged that Ahmed had kidnapped him from his vehicle in 2005 after he testified against him in the Raju Pal murder case. He also accused him of electrocuting him to force him to withdraw his statement. Following the alleged episode, Umesh had given a written statement in 2006 that Ahmed was not present at the scene of Raju Pal’s murder and that he didn’t want to testify.
However, in 2007, after the Mayawati-led BSP government came to power in the state, Umesh Pal registered the abduction case against Ahmed. The trial began in 2009 after the police framed charges against Ahmed. The news agency ANI reported that in 2016, “an attempt was made to throw Umesh Pal from the fourth floor of the court premises to make him withdraw the case”, an FIR for which was registered at a Prayagraj police station.
Umesh Pal had appealed to the court for a fast hearing following the episode. But the Allahabad high court ordered the MP-MLA court to finish the hearing of the abduction case by March 16, 2023. Umesh Pal, however, isn’t alive anymore. He was murdered on February 24, when he was returning from a hearing of his abduction case.
His wife and mother expressed their satisfaction with the judgment but appealed for the death sentence to be imposed on Ahmed in the Umesh Pal murder case, reported ANI.
Ahmed was a former gangster who became a politician. He served as both an MP and an MLA and is said to have close links with many political parties in UP, including the BJP and SP. He has more than 100 cases registered against him. It has been alleged that Ahmed, who was lodged in the Deoria prison, planned Umesh Pal’s murder remotely in February. He was transferred to Sabarmati jail in Gujarat for security reasons after Umesh Pal’s murder.