Lucknow: He may be in prison over the murder of poet Madhumita Shukla, but the ruling Samajwadi Party has nevertheless given ticket to Amarmani Tripathi to contest the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election.
Ironically, the announcement of fielding Tripathi from Laxmipur in Maharajganj district came almost simultaneous to a forensic finding that could further nail him in the murder case.
In his deposition before the special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court in Dehradun on Thursday, SPR Prasad from the Hyderabad-based National Forensic Laboratory confirmed the matching of DNA sample from Madhumita's foetus with that of Tripathi.
Madhumita, a 26-year-old Hindi poetess, was six months pregnant when she was shot dead at her apartment in Lucknow's Paper Mill colony in May 2003.
Both Tripathi and his co-accused wife Madhumani are currently in Dehradun jail since the case was transferred from Uttar Pradesh to Uttarakhand. The CBI is investigating the crime.
Tripathi has as many as 32 criminal cases pending against him in different Uttar Pradesh courts, besides the Madhumita murder case.
He also figured prominently in a sensational kidnapping of an affluent Lucknow businessman that led then chief minister Rajnath Singh to sack him from his cabinet where he had bargained a ministerial berth after defecting from the Congress.
From a personal bodyguard of an infamous mafia lord from eastern Uttar Pradesh (who continues to be a minister in the Mulayam Singh Yadav), Tripathi rose to become a legislator in the Congress.
He later joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and still later managed to grab a Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) ticket in 2002.
He was instrumental in engineering a split in BSP, following which he found his way into the Samajwadi Party.
Even after he was jailed, Mulayam's younger brother and high profile minister Shivpal Yadav is known to have ensured VIP facilities for Tripathi. This led to the case being moved out of Uttar Pradesh.
Comments
0 comment