A Special Court on Friday awarded life term to Bihar’s dreaded mafia don and former controversial MP of RJD Mohammad Shahabuddin on Friday in the 11-year-old double murder case. The 48-year-old former four-time MP from Siwan and two-term MlA from Ziradei is already in jail for over a decade and convicted in some other criminal cases.
A PhD in Political Science, Shahabu, as he is popularly known, had earlier been given life imprisonment in May 2007 for abduction of a CPI-Ml worker Chhote lal Gupta who was never seen thereafter and widely presumed to have been murdered.
He was also given ten-year rigorous imprisonment for the attempted murder on then Siwan SP SK Singhal in 1996.
Special court judge Ajay Kumar Srivastava sentenced Shahabuddin and three others — Rajkumar Sah, Sheikh Aslam and Arif alias Sonu — to life imprisonment.
The RJD leader and others had been charged for abducting two brothers Girish Raj and Satish Raj and killing them by pouring acid. Both died on August 16, 2004, but their bodies could not be found.
The eldest of the two deceased brothers Rajiv Roshan, who claimed to be eyewitness of the macabre killing appeared before the special court, but he too was murdered on June 16, 2014.
Their father Chanda Babu is a prominent grain trader and associated with BJP.
Reacting to the order of the special judge, Shahabuddin’s wife Hina, who had unsuccessfully contested lok Sabha polls twice from Siwan, resolved to challenge the verdict in High Court. The family of victims was also not satisfied as they wanted capital punishment.
Chanda Babu’s two sons were waylaid by Shahbu’s men when he received to resisted extortion bid. Shahabuddin pleaded that when the killing took place on August 16, 2004, he was behind bars. The jail administration refuted that he went out of prison, but Rajiv Roshan told the court before his own murder that everything happened in the presence of the former MP.