By IANS
Patna : Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) MP Mohammad Shahabuddin was Friday sentenced to a year’s rigorous imprisonment in one of the 40 cases against him – this one for threatening a police official.
Additional District and Sessions Judge B.B. Gupta found Shahabuddin guilty of threatening then Jiradei police station sub-inspector Harendra Rai over a mobile phone from Beur jail in Patna in 2005.
The court – inside the Siwan jail, 150 km from here – convicted Shahabuddin on the basis of circumstantial evidence under Section 506 of the Indian Penal Code.
This was the fifth case in which the MP was convicted out of the eight cases in which the trial against him has concluded in the last one year. In three other cases, Shahabuddin was acquitted for lack of evidence.
According to the first information report (FIR) in the case, Rai, who was the investigating officer in several criminal cases against the MP, was threatened on Feb 2, 2005 and warned that he should not go ahead with the probes.
Now lodged in Siwan jail, Shahabuddin was arrested in New Delhi in 2005 following the seizure of arms from his ancestral home in Siwan.
Last year, the Patna High Court directed that a special court inside Siwan jail should try all pending cases against him. He is now being tried in 27 more criminal cases.
Shahabuddin was convicted for the first time in March last year for his role in an attack on the Communist Party of India-Marxist Leninist (CPI-ML) office in Siwan in 1998.
In May, the special court sentenced him to life imprisonment after convicting him for the kidnapping and murder of Chhote Lal Gupta, a CPI-ML worker, in 1999.
In August, he was sentenced to 10 years in jail for attacking then Siwan superintendent of police S.K. Singhal 11 years ago.
In the first week of February this year, a charge sheet was filed against Shahabuddin in a case of poaching under the Wildlife Protection Act.
A Lok Sabha member from Siwan since 1996, the cases against involve murder, abduction and possession of illegal arms.