Supreme Court seeks UP reply on Atiq Ahmed’s antics in jail

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Tuesday sought a report from the UP government taking note of a TOI report about jailed ex-MP and don Atiq Ahmed getting a businessman kidnapped by his goons and brought before him to his cell in Deoria prison last month.

When a bench comprising Justices L Nageswar Rao and Sanjay K Kaul took up a PIL by Ashwini Upadhyay seeking special courts to try cases against politicians, amicus curiae Vijay Hansaria and advocate Sneha Kalita drew the court’s attention to Ahmed’s clout as a don who despite being lodged in jail could call the shots and kidnap persons into his prison cell in connivance with jail officials.

This cannot be allowed to happen in a country governed by rule of law. The Uttar Pradesh government must answer the court about what has been done about the incident and action taken against the ex-MP and jail officials,” Hansaria told the court. He also alleged that the authorities had found that the prison CCTV footage of the incident has been tampered with.

The bench asked UP additional advocate general Aishwarya Bhati to submit a report on the incident in two weeks. TOI had on January 1 reported that real estate dealer Mohit Jaiswal had filed an FIR on December 28 alleging that he was kidnapped from Lucknow and was taken to Deoria jail where he was assaulted by Atiq Ahmed and his aides and was forced to transfer his business to them. The police had admitted that the jail CCTV recording has been tampered with. In his report to the SC, amicus and senior advocate Hansaria cited the Deoria jail incident to press for a fool-proof witness protection regime during the trial of politicians in special courts across the country for speedy decision on cases which have been pending for decades.