More trouble is in store for don-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari as the UP government has registered a case for illegal use of ambulance with Uttar Pradesh registration number by the jailed gangster in Punjab.
The First Information Report (FIR) has been registered against Bharatiya Janata Party leader Dr Alka Rai of Mau district in the city Kotwali police station in connection with the ambulance used by Mukhtar Ansari while going from Ropar jail in Punjab to Delhi recently.
The legal proceedings would now bring UP government with loggerhead with their Punjab counterparts as the probe would also look into how an ambulance with UP registration number was allowed by the local administration in Punjab to be used by a jailed don.
Interestingly, when the UP Police made a preliminary investigation after the matter came to light, the address at which the ambulance was registered and the hospital in Barabanki turned out to be fake. After this, ARTO (Administration) Pankaj Singh filed a complaint at Kotwali police station in Mau district to register a FIR in this case. Surprisingly, the file of the ambulance was also found 'missing' from the RTO in Barabanki.
CO (City) in Mau, Seema Yadav, said that a case had been registered against Dr Alka Rai, a doctor from Mau district, in the ambulance case. The CO said the police would investigate the case and take strong action against the culprits.
Mukhtar Ansari of Mau district is lodged in Ropar jail in Punjab for a long time. The UP government had approached the Supreme Court to bring him back. The UP Police went to Punjab to take charge of Mukhtar on the orders of the Supreme Court. Mukhtar, who reached the court from there, used a registered private ambulance (UP 41 AT 7171) of Barabanki district.
Police said on Friday that the ambulance was registered at the ARTO in the name of Dr Alka Rai, 56, Shyam Sanjeevani Hospital, Rafinagar, Barabanki, but investigation showed that no such hospital existed in Barabanki.
On the other hand, the scrutiny of the ambulance's papers the ARTO office showed that it was registered on December 13, 2013 and the ambulance was not fit since February 1, 2016 and had not been insured since January 2017.
The ambulance's owner, Dr Alka Rai, is said to be a resident of Mau district and runs the hospital in the above name in Mau but not in Barabanki. On January 20, 2020, a notice was sent by ARTO to Dr Alka Rai.
At the same time, no hospital registration in this name has been found in the CMO office in Barabanki.
Dr Rai reportedly told the police that Mukhtar Ansari's representative Mujhahid contacted her and took a sign on some papers claiming that Ansari wanted to donate an ambulance to her hospital from his MLA fund. She said that she had no knowledge of what happened later but her hospital did not receive any ambulance from Mukhtar.