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After about two years of waiting, mafia-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari was finally handed over into the custody of Uttar Pradesh on Tuesday afternoon.
The strong contingent of cops waited at Ropar jail for about two hours to complete the paperwork and other formalities, before they left with the don and are expected to reach Banda district jail around Tuesday midnight.
Mukhtar was put in the ambulance and was being brought under the supervision of doctors and medical staff. The UP Police had earlier returned empty handed nine times when they went to Punjab to take custody of Ansari.
Reports confirmed that the UP Police reached Ropar in the wee hours of Tuesday. They entered the Ropar district jail at noon to take Mukhtar's custody. Senior Superintendent of Police, Ropar, Akhil Chowdhary, was present to supervise the entire operation and to ensure that the Supreme Court guidelines were strictly followed.
The Punjab police also took photos of the entire fleet of vehicles of UP Police and later also accompanied them till the Punjab border to check any untoward incident. Crossing Panipat and Sonipat, the fleet reportedly reached New Delhi in the evening from where it was to take the Eastern Peripheral Expressway to reach Banda jail via Yamuna Expressway, Taj Expressway, Etawah and Auraiya. The fleet stopped for 10 minutes at Murthal and left after alerting the cops of all the districts through which it would pass.
Meanwhile, all preparations are in place and barrack No. 15 of the Banda jail is once again ready to house the dreaded don. Mukhtar earlier also remained in the same barrack for two years before he was shifted to Ropar in 2019.
District Magistrate of Banda, Anand Kumar Singh, district police chief SS Meena and many other senior officers also visited the jail on Tuesday afternoon to review the security arrangements.
Banda jail is famous for housing dreaded criminals, dacoits like Daduwa, Balkariya, Gauri Yadav, Sangram Singh etc. Besides, even Raghuraj Pratap Singh, gangster-turned politician Atiq Ahmed, accused in Sheelu murder case, Purshotam Dwivedi, listed gangster of Noida, Anil Dujana all were lodged from time to time in the same jail. Interestingly the condition of the inmates lodged in the Banda jail at present can be gauged by the fact that against a capacity of 600 persons, presently about 1,200 inmates are lodged there.  
Meanwhile, the Barabanki police arrested a close associate of Mukhtar Ansari for allegedly using fake documents to register the ambulance, which was recently used to ferry the gangster-turned-politician from a jail to a court in Mohali in Punjab.
On Friday, a case was registered against a Mau-based doctor, Alka Rai of Shyam Sanjeevani Hospital and Research Center, whose forged documents were used for registering the ambulance.
"Rajnath Yadav, who has been arrested, is a close associate of Mukhtar Ansari. He and Mujahid went to Alka Rai and got her signatures using fake documents. Based on that, the ambulance was registered… We are going to arrest more people in the coming days," SP (Barabanki) Yamuna Prasad said.
He added that charges of criminal conspiracy, criminal intimidation, knowingly furnishing false information to a public servant and Section 7 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act had been imposed against Mukhtar Ansari, Alka Rai, Sheshanath Rai, Mujahid and Rajnath Yadav.
It may be mentioned that a team from Uttar Pradesh which reached Punjab to probe the ambulance case on Monday was shocked to find it lying abandoned in front of a roadside dhaba, 15-kilometre away from Ropar jail.
The henchmen of don reportedly tried to damage the evidence but sources said that as they learnt about the arrival of UP police, they abandoned the vehicle and escaped.