A court in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghazipur district sentenced gangster-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari to 10 years imprisonment in a case filed under the Gangsters Act in 2010, reported Live Law.

Additional District and Sessions Judge Arvind Kumar also directed Ansari, a former MLA, to pay a fine of Rs 5 lakh.

The case was filed after the killing of a teacher named Kapildev Singh and an attempt to kill a trader named Meer Hasan in 2009.

The court also sentenced Sonu Yadav, a member of Ansari’s gang, to five years of imprisonment and fined him Rs 2 lakh, PTI reported.

This was Ansari’s sixth conviction in the last 13 months. He has a total of 65 cases against him and has been in jail since 2005 after he surrendered to the police in connection with a communal riot that took place in the town of Mau. Ansari is currently lodged at the Banda district jail.

On June 5, the former MLA was sentenced to life imprisonment in the murder case of Awadhesh Rai, the brother of Congress leader Ajay Rai, from nearly 32 years ago. Awadhesh Rai was shot dead on August 3, 1991, outside his home in Varanasi’s Lahurabir area.

Before that, an Uttar Pradesh court convicted Ansari and his brother – former Bahujan Samaj Party MP Afzal Ansari – in another case filed under the Gangsters Act in April. While Mukhtar Ansari was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, Afzal Ansari was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment.

In December, Mukhtar Ansari and his alleged associate Bheem Singh were sentenced to ten years in jail in a 1996 case under the Gangsters Act. He was sentenced to seven years imprisonment for threatening to kill a jailor and pointing a gun at him in September 2022.