MLA Anant Singh, aide get 10-yr RI in AK-47 recovery case

A 10-year jail term means Anant Singh is liable to be disqualified as an MLA and barred from contesting an election.

A special court in Patna on Tuesday sentenced Anant Singh, the four-time MLA from Mokama in Bihar who has a long history sheet of crime, to 10 years of rigorous imprisonment in the 2019 case of recovery of AK-47 rifle and grenades from his house in which he was convicted last week.  

RJD MLA Anant Singh after being sentenced to 10 -year RI on Tuesday. (Santosh Kumar/HT Photo)

The court of judge Triloki Dubey also sentenced Singh’s associate Sunil Ram to 10-year RI in the same case.

A 10-year jail term means Singh is liable to be disqualified as an MLA and barred from contesting an election.

His counsel Sunil Kumar told HT they will challenge the order in Patna High Court.

According to the prosecution, a team of Patna police raided Singh’s house in his native village Ladma under Barh police station limits in rural Patna on August 16, 2019, and seized one AK-47 assault rifle, two hand grenades and live cartridges from there.

Singh was booked under the stringent anti-terror law, Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Amendment Act, 2019. The legislator, who went absconding after the police issued a lookout circular against him, surrendered before the a Saket court in Delhi on August 23, 2019. Since then, he has been lodged in Beur Central Jail in Patna.

On June 14 this year, the special court in Patna had pronounced him guilty under the Arms Act and relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

Singh, who won twice from Mokama on a JD(U) ticket, was once known to be close to chief minister Nitish Kumar but fell out with him ahead of the 2015 assembly elections. He left Kumar’s JD(U) and contested as an Independent and retained Mokama seat, winning it with a margin of 18,000. In 2020 polls, he stood as an RJD candidate and again won the seat by a margin of 35,291 votes.

Singh has a long history sheet of 38 criminal cases, seven of them relating to murders.

Singh is the third RJD MLA to lost assembly membership following conviction in a criminal case in the last four years.

On December 27, 2018, the state assembly terminated the membership of RJD’s Raj Ballabh Yadav, MLA from Nawada, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for raping a minor.

In November 2018, senior party MLA Illiyas Hussain, who was convicted and awarded five years’ imprisonment in multi-crore bitumen scam by a CBI court on September 27, 2018, was disqualified for assembly membership.