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Updated: Jan 22, 2019 22:30 IST

Jailed BSP MLA Mukhtar Ansari was arrested on charges of trying to extort of Rs 10 crore from a Mohali-based builder after he was brought to Mohali from Uttar Pradesh’s Banda jail.

The gangster-turned-politician was produced before the court of judicial magistrate, Amit Bakshi, on Tuesday afternoon and it sent him to two days police custody.

Though the police remained tight-lipped on the case against Ansari, police sources said that he was arrested after a builder in sector 70 filed a complaint that he had received a call from a man identifying himself as Mukhtar Ansari and seeking Rs 10 crores as “protection money”.

A police team procured his production warrants and brought to Mohali under high security. A case under sections 386 (Extortion by putting a person in fear of death or grievous hurt) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of the Indian Penal Code was registered in Mataur police station.

Mohali’s senior superintendent of police Kuldeep Singh Chahal said, “We are looking into the complaint of extortion call made in name of Ansari and are even looking at old case pertaining to arms act registered against him.”

“Investigations are on,” he said, but did not reveal any more details.

Grandson of freedom fighter Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari, who was president of the Indian National Congress in 1927, Ansari entered eastern Uttar Pradesh’s crime world in the early 1990s. In jail since 2006, Ansari faces around 45 criminal cases including the 2005 murder of BJP legislator Krishnanand Rai, and the murder of Ram Singh Maurya, a witness to the murder of a local contractor.

In 1995, he joined the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and was elected a legislator from Mau. Since then, he has won six elections.

In order to clean its image, the BSP expelled Ansari in 2010, and he floated his own party, the Quami Ekta Dal, and won from the Mau seat in 2012. Later he merged his outfit with the BSP, and won the state elections as a BSP candidate in 2017.