Azam Khan, the head of the Samajwadi Party (SP), his wife Tazeen Fatima, and their son Abdullah Azam were all sentenced to seven years in prison on Wednesday by a court in Uttar Pradesh’s Rampur district after the politician and his family were detained in connection with a case involving a fraudulent birth certificate from 2019.
Azam and members of his family received the maximum seven-year jail term from Magistrate Shobit Bansal of the MP-MLA court.
Former District Government Counsel Arun Parkash Saxena, who represented the prosecution, claimed that after the court’s decision, “the trio was taken into judicial custody and will be sent to the jail from the court itself.”
An FIR was filed against the group on January 3, 2019, after a complaint made by BJP MLA Akash Saxena at the Ganj police station in Rampur. The complaint said that Azam Khan and his wife utilized their connections to assist their kid in obtaining two false birth certificates, one from Lucknow and one from Rampur.
Abdullah Azam’s date of birth was listed as January 1, 1993, on the certificate provided by the Rampur municipality, according to the charge sheet submitted by the Uttar Pradesh Police. He was born on September 30, 1990, in Lucknow, according to the other certificate.
Abdullah Azam was previously found guilty by a Moradabad court in 2008 of improper restraint and assault on a public worker in order to dissuade him from running in the 2022 assembly election from the Suar seat on the SP ticket.
Abdullah Azam was removed from the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly two days after he was found guilty and given a two-year prison sentence in February of this year. He requested a stay of the conviction at the High Court, but it was denied.
According to the Representation of the People Act (RPA), 1951, anybody who receives a sentence of two years or more in prison is prohibited from running for office “from the date of such conviction” and is also prohibited for a further six years after completing their term.
Azam Khan received a two-year prison term in July of this year as a result of a hate speech charge brought against him during the 2019 Lok Sabha election campaign.
Azam Khan was found guilty in the hate speech case by a court in Rampur, UP, and received a two-year jail term as well as a fine.
The Samajwadi Party leader had already been found guilty and given a prison term in a related case in October of last year for using derogatory language at a rally for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections against UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and others.
The conviction led to Khan’s disqualification and ultimately to a byelection in his district that the BJP won.