Listening to the petition filed by the infamous criminal Shahabuddin challenging the lower court’s verdict, the Supreme Court of India today has rejected his appeal and maintained the Patna High court’s verdict of life imprisonment.
Mohammad Shahabuddin is a politician who was elected four times as a Member of Parliament from Siwan, Bihar, with the Rashtriya Janata Dal(RJD) party of Lalu Prasad Yadav, and 2-times as MLA, to the Bihar Vidhan Sabha. The first case against Shahabuddin was registered in 1986 at the age of 19. Thereafter, several criminal cases against him got added to the list. A history sheet was opened in his name in Hussainganj police station and he was declared an ‘A’ category criminal.
During 2004 elections, Though Shahabuddin was in jail, his opponents were intimidated for campaigning against him. Immediately after the elections, which he won by a margin of 100,000 votes (16%), nine party workers of the nearest candidate Om Prakash Yadav of JDU, were found murdered, allegedly for daring to campaign against him. He had been winning Lok Sabha elections from Siwan since 1996, prior to which he was elected twice to the Bihar Legislative Assembly (1990 and 1995).
In August 2004, two brothers Satish Roshan and Girish Roshan were abducted from their shops after they denied paying extortion of Rs 2.5 lakhs to Shahabuddin’s henchmen. The brothers were then drenched in acid in Pratappur village by Shahabuddin and his aides before brutally killing them. Later, the only eyewitness of the massacre and his third brother Rajiv Roshan was also shot dead on June 16, 2014.
In November 2005, a special team of the Bihar Police arrested him from Delhi when he had come to attend the Parliament session. Just before his arrest, the police had seized several illegal weapons, Army’s night vision devices and modern arms and ammunition made in Pakistan’s ordinance factories. Citing many convictions in criminal cases, he was debarred from contesting 2009 general elections.
Apart from Shahabuddin, his associates, Raj Kumar Sah, Sheikh Alam, and Munna Mian, were also convicted by a special court in Siwan on December 12, 2015. After this, Shahabuddin had appealed against the verdict in 2017 by the Patna High Court, but his appeal was rejected there too.
