Under the Yogi Adityanath government’s zero tolerance policy, mafia Mukhtar Ansari has been sentenced to five and a half years of rigorous imprisonment in the case of threatening a witness in the murder of a coal businessman by the MP/MLA court of Varanasi.

Additionally, a fine of Rs 10,000 has been imposed on him.

Earlier, in the murder of Awadhesh Rai, Mukhtar Ansari had been given the maximum punishment of life imprisonment. He has been sentenced in seven cases so far.

The MP/MLA court in Varanasi found Mukhtar Ansari guilty of threatening witness Mahavir Prasad Rungta in the murder of a coal businessman, Nand Kishore Rungta.

In the hearing held on Friday in the MP/MLA court, all the allegations against Mukhtar Ansari were proven correct. In this case, the court sentenced him to imprisonment for five and a half years and imposed a fine of Rs 10,000.

On January 22, 1997, after the kidnapping of Nand Kishore Rungta, a coal businessman in the Jawahar Nagar area under Bhelupur police station of Varanasi, he was murdered. Mukhtar Ansari and his associate Ataur Rahman, also known as Sikandar, were implicated in this murder.

Thereafter, on the evening of November 5, 1997, threat calls were made to Mahavir Prasad Rungta, the brother of Nand Kishore Rungta, on his landline phone, asking the family not to cooperate with the police or the Central Bureau of Investigation in the murder case. Also, a threat was made to blow up the entire family with a bomb. In this regard, a case was registered at Bhelupur police station on December 1.

The police completed the investigation, and on July 3, 1998, the charge sheet was filed in the court against Mukhtar Ansari.