A gangster politician and his brother were assassinated in India on Saturday night, while being followed by a cloud of television reporters. The latter's cameras broadcast live how three gunmen, who until then had pretended to be journalists, shot former deputies Atiq and Khalid Ahmed at point blank range, who died instantly.
Both were handcuffed and escorted by the police, on their way to a medical examination, for the transfer of prison, at ten o'clock at night, in the town of Prayagraj, in northern India. Both Ahmed brothers had been deputies for that constituency, the first in the Indian Lower House and the second in the Uttar Pradeh state assembly, for the Samajwadi Party (Socialist Party).
Both brothers were imprisoned until a few days ago in Gujarat and were transferred to Uttar Pradesh to be tried for one of their more than 100 open cases. Specifically, the one that links them to the murder of a rival politician who seized the seat occupied by the Ahmet family in the aforementioned town, as well as the subsequent murder of one of the witnesses to said murder. Atiq Ahmed had said that he feared for his life if he was transferred to Uttar Pradesh, which he tried to prevent in vain by appealing to higher courts.
On Saturday, the mobster had even more reason to be uneasy, since one of his sons had been killed two days earlier in Uttar Pradesh in an extrajudicial execution, disguised as a shootout with law enforcement. To this we must add that a few days earlier, a deputy of the ruling BJP in said state had explicitly called to "eliminate Atiq Ahmed in a shootout", assuring that the policeman who did so "would have the gates of paradise open". He had been preceded by the head of government of Uttar Pradesh himself, from the same Hindu chauvinist party, the yogi Adityanath, who had promised in the chamber to "sink the mafia", in an allusion to Ahmed and his collusion with the previous party to state command.
The circumstance occurs that the young gunmen, who offered no resistance when arrested, shouted the profession of Hindu faith "Jai Shri Ram", while they shot the victims, who moved with difficulty when handcuffed with the same handcuffs. . Something that provides a disturbing religious bias to the crime, even though the killers have allegedly declared that they just wanted to "be famous."
The Ahmed brothers have already been buried in their nearby hometown, under strong police force. The authorities have introduced restrictions on the internet and telephony to limit "the spread of rumours" and have made a plea in favor of "maintaining law and order."
State authorities say they have confiscated property illegally acquired by the Ahmet family worth the equivalent of €1.3 billion. Uttar Pradesh, would be the fifth most populous state in the world if it were independent, with more than 225 million inhabitants. It is also one of the most backward in India. In any case, the mobilization of votes also requires enormous amounts of money there, which leads almost all parties to offer candidacies to the highest bidder.
