“Anything Can Happen”; Azam Khan Fears Encounter While UP Police Shifts Him And Son To Different Jails (Image:Twitter/meghupdates)

Senior leader and founding member of Samajwadi Party (SP) Azam Khan expressed his fear of being killed in an encounter before the Uttar Pradesh police shifted him and son Abdullah Azam to different jails from Rampur on Saturday night. Mr Khan was convicted in a fake birth certificate case and was shifted from the jail due to security reasons. He, reportedly, was transferred to Hardoi Jail and his son to Sitapur Jail.

“Hamara encounter bhi ho sakta hai…Kuch bhi ho sakta hai” (Anything can happen to us; we can get encountered in between our journeys), he said to the media before taken away by the police for a jail shift. Uttar Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister Brajesh Pathak on Monday responded to Mr Khan’s statement and ensured the maintenance of strict law and order. “Nobody is allowed to take law and order in their own hands”, said the Deputy CM to the news agency ANI.

Azam Khan – who formerly served as the Member of Parliament from Rampur – along with wife Tanzeen Fatima and son Abdullah, was convicted a few days back on October 18 in a 2019 case of alleged forgery of Abdullah’s birth certificate. The three were sentenced to seven years in jail, and it was the fourth case in which Mr Khan has been convicted in the past one year.

As reported by the Press Trust of India, the father and son were taken to separate jails in different vehicles with adequate security measures, said the District General of Prisons, SN Sabat. They were stepped out of the jail around 4:40 am in the early morning and reached safe at the destinations by 9 am.

#WATCH | Lucknow: On Samajwadi Party leader Azam Khan”s statement, UP Deputy CM Brajesh Pathak says, “We will maintain the law and order and nobody is allowed to take law and order in their own hands,” https://t.co/w489TYCH6r pic.twitter.com/yjEpprpuJZ

— ANI UP/Uttarakhand (@ANINewsUP) October 23, 2023

Mr Khan was earlier lodged at the Sitapur jail for almost two years in various cases and was released in May 2022, after securing a bail order from the top court. On October 2022, he was sentenced by an MP-MLA magistrate court for three-year jail term after finding him guilty of hate speech in a 2019 case. On May 2023, a UP court acquitted him in the hate speech case.