Jailed gangster-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari died of cardiac arrest on Thursday after being admitted to a hospital in Uttar Pradesh’s Banda district due to his medical condition. After complaining of vomiting, he was taken to the hospital unconscious.
The five-time MLA from eastern UP Mau was involved in real estate business and was also involved in 52 criminal cases in UP and many other places. He contested elections twice as a Bahujan Samajwadi Party (BSP) candidate. He last ran in the parliamentary elections in 2017.
Soon after his death, bans under Section 144 CrPC were imposed in Uttar Pradesh, police said on Thursday.
Who was Mukhtar Ansari?
Mukhtar Ansari was involved in real estate and contract work and is said to have started expanding his network in the underworld through eastern Uttar Pradesh, also known as Purvanchal, in the 1990s.
A historian at Mohammadabad police station in Ghazipur district, Ansari was acquitted by a Delhi court in 2005 in the murder case of BJP MLA Krishna Nand Rai.
The MP-MLA was sentenced to life imprisonment by a special court on March 13 in the three-decade-old fake gun ID case. In 2017, a local court in Ghazipur, UP acquitted him in a case related to the 2009 murder of Ajai Prakash Singh, a contractor, in Mau. He was one of the most famous ‘Robinhoods’ of the region as voters in Mau (sadar), 100 km from Gorakhpur, elected him five times, many times while he was in jail.
Section 144 imposed across UP
Many police officers were deployed outside the hospital shortly after Ansari was brought there. After Ansari’s death was confirmed, bans under Section 144 of the Criminal Code (CrPC) were imposed in Uttar Pradesh following Ansari’s death, Uttar Pradesh Director General of Police Prashant Kumar said.
Section 144 prohibits large gatherings in public spaces. Besides, police personnel have been deployed in additional numbers in Banda, Mau, Ghazipur and Varanasi districts, he added. Ansari was on the list of 66 gangsters issued by the Uttar Pradesh police last year.
