The apex court heard the convicted politician’s request for transfer to a jail outside UP in January and set the next hearing for July 2024. Two days ago, his brother alleged Ansari was poisoned in jail as part of a conspiracy to murder him.
By Omar Rashid
New Delhi: Three months after his lawyers moved the Supreme Court about the possibility that he may be eliminated in custody, jailed former legislator Mukhtar Ansari died on Thursday, March 28 due to “cardiac arrest” after he was rushed to a hospital from Banda jail in Uttar Pradesh.
Government doctors said Ansari had fallen unconscious but two days before his death, his brother Afzal Ansari, a former Member of Parliament and Samajwadi Party candidate from Ghazipur in 2024, publicly alleged that he was being poisoned in jail as part of a “conspiracy” to murder him.
In December 2023, Mukhtar’s younger son, Umar Ansari, had approached the Supreme Court apprehending that the state government was planning to assassinate him in Banda jail where he was lodged as a convict and accused in several criminal cases.
Ansari, who was under the radar of the Yogi Adityanath-led Bharatiya Janata Party government ever since it came to power in the state in 2017, fainted in his cell and was taken to the Rani Durgavati Medical College at around 8:25pm on Thursday, after vomiting and losing consciousness, said a medical bulletin of the hospital.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.