A prison official confirmed that an Uttar Pradesh police squad had returned gangster-politician Atiq Ahmad to his home state on Tuesday.  In connection with a criminal case against gangster-politician Atiq Ahmad, a police team from Uttar Pradesh arrived at the Sabarmati Central Jail in Gujarat’s Ahmedabad city on Tuesday, according to a jail official. Atiq Ahmad was being held there. 

On March 26, the Uttar Pradesh Police also transported Ahmad to Prayagraj in order to present him in court. In the kidnapping case involving Umesh Pal from 2006, the court there sentenced him to life in prison on March 28.  The 60-year-old former MLA for Uttar Pradesh and Lok Sabha member was transported from Prayagraj to the high-security jail in Gujarat on March 29 in a UP police van. 

A jail official here on Monday stated, “A team of the Uttar Pradesh police is at the Sabarmati Central Jail to take Atiq Ahmad to UP in connection with a criminal case. He will be taken thereafter submission of all the documents (required for his custody).” According to him, Ahmad would probably be sent to Prayagraj for questioning in the death of Umesh Pal. In April 2019, the Supreme Court ordered that Ahmad be transferred to a high-security facility in Gujarat after he was charged with planning the abduction and assault of real estate investor Mohit Jaiswal while he was incarcerated. Since June 2019, he has been detained here in a jail.

According to authorities, Ahmad has been implicated in more than 100 criminal cases, including the recent murder of Umesh Pal. Raju Pal, a Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) MLA who was fatally shot in 2005, was one of the most dramatic crimes in which Ahmad was reportedly engaged. On February 24 of this year, Umesh Pal, a crucial witness in that murder case, was shot and killed outside his Prayagraj home.

Last month, Ahmad requested protection from the Supreme Court, stating that he and his family had been wrongly named as suspects in the Prayagraj murder case of Umesh Pal and that the UP Police might kill him in a staged encounter.  In his request, Ahmad claimed that the UP Police were most likely looking for his transportation and police remand to transport him from Ahmedabad to Prayagraj and that he, “genuinely apprehends that he may be eliminated during this transit period”.