‘Illegal’ farmland of jailed gangster attached in Shamli

Confirming the development, Shamli District Magistrate Jasjit Kaur told mediapersons that a team of the district administration and police attached the illegal properties of Maheshwari in Adampur village under section 14-A of the UP Gangsters Act.

Police said during the preliminary inquiry, they found that Maheshwari had bought the land — registered in the name of Sanjeev Maheshwari, his wife Payal and their two minor sons aged nine and 15 years — using “illicit money earned from illegal activities”. Payal had unsuccessfully contested the 2017 Assembly election from the Muzaffarnagar seat on a Rashtriya Lok Dal ticket.

“Maheshwari has been lodged at the Lucknow district jail. He was booked under the UP Gangster Act in 2010 and an order to seize his property was issued in 2020. But, due to some reasons, it could not be executed then,” said Baburi police station SHO Virendra Kumar.

Hailing from Shamli, Maheshwari has 26 criminal cases, including nine murder cases, registered against him in several districts of Uttar Pradesh (Muzaffarnagar, Farukkhabad, Lucknow and Meerut, among others), Uttarakhand (Haridwar) and Delhi.

He was also booked in the murder cases of senior BJP leader Braham Dutt Dwivedi in 1997 and BJP MLA Krishna Nand Rai in 2005. Both cases were investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which filed a charge sheet against Maheshwari and the other accused.

The Allahabad High Court in 2017 upheld the sessions court judgment, handing down life imprisonment to Maheshwari and another accused Samajwadi Party ex-MLA Vijay Singh in the Dwivedi murder case. In 2019, Maheshwari and others were, however, acquitted in the Rai murder case.

Earlier this week, Shamli police claimed to have arrested Maheshwari’s associate Anil, alias, Pintu, and seized an AK-47 rifle, cartridges and magazines from his possession. Police said they were trying to find out more information about the other accused and the procurement of the seized weapons.