Don-turned-neta Atiq Ahmed brought back to Sabarmati jail in Ahmedabad

AHMEDABAD: Gangster-turned-politician Atiq Ahmed was brought back to the Sabarmati Central Jail in Ahmedabad on Wednesday evening, a day after a court at Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh sentenced him to life imprisonment in the 2006 Umesh Pal kidnapping case.
Ahmed, a former Uttar Pradesh MLA and Lok Sabha MP, was brought back to the high-security jail in Gujarat in a UP police van after a nearly 24-hour-long journey by road from Prayagraj.
The UP police had on Sunday taken Ahmed's custody from Sabarmati prison to produce him in a special MP-MLA court that conducted the trial in the kidnapping case. Umesh Pal, a key witness in the 2006 BSP MLA Raju Pal murder case, was gunned down on February 24 in Prayagraj.
The special court on Tuesday held the former Lok Sabha MP and two others guilty in the 17-year-old kidnapping case and sentenced them to life imprisonment. They were pronounced guilty under Section 364-A (kidnapping or abduction in order to murder) of the Indian Penal Code.
Ahmed has been lodged in the Sabarmati jail since June 2019 after the Supreme Court in April that year directed that the former MP from Phulpur in UP be shifted to a high-security facility in Gujarat. He was accused of orchestrating the kidnapping of a real estate businessman, Mohit Jaiswal, from a prison in the northern state.