Patna, May 6: A Muzaffarpur court on Friday issued an arrest warrant against a senior leader of the All India Congress Committee (AICC), Mukul Wasnik, in connection with a case related to alleged financial irregularities in the allotment of party tickets during the last Assembly elections in Bihar.
The chief judicial magistrate of Muzaffarpur, Ramesh Chandra Malviya, issued an arrest warrant against Wasnik and ordered to get the warrant executed through the metropolitan magistrate of the Patiala House court in Delhi.
Wasnik has been made accused under sections 420, 384, 342 and 120 (B) of the Indian Penal Code.
The court had taken cognisance against three persons, Wasnik, Mehboob Ali Quaiser and Vineeta Vijay, all three Congress leaders, on January 17 this year.
The other party leaders, including Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Sagar Raika, were, however, exonerated for want of evidence.
The arrest warrant was issued against Wasnik after he failed to turn up before the court even after repeated summons.
The last summon against Wasnik was issued on April 14. Though his counsel Mukul Kumar pleaded the court to exonerate Wasnik from personal appearance, the court rejected his plea and ordered issuance of an arrest warrant. Two other accused Quaiser and Vijay are currently out on bail.
The complaint was filed by Sudhir Kumar Ojha in the court of the CJM on October 22 last year in which he (Ojha) alleged that the party leaders had taken Rs 15 lakh from him for allotting him a ticket from Muzaffarpur during the 2010 Assembly polls.
“I neither got the party ticket nor the money. When I asked for my money, they assaulted me black and blue and even threatened me with dire consequences,” Ojha alleged in the complaint.
On Thursday, summons were issued against RJD chief Lalu Prasad and former Union minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh asking them to appear before it on July 4 in connection with a complaint against them for landing their helicopter on national highway 28 at Maniari in Muzaffarpur without authoritative permission on August 1, 2007.
Additional district and sessions judge (VII) Choudhary Vijendra Kumar Roy summoned the two RJD leaders after hearing a revision petition filed by Muzaffarpur-based advocate Ojha.
Ojha had charged Prasad and Singh with landing the chopper on the national highway during the aerial survey of floods on August 1, 2007 without prior permission from the district authorities.
He had also alleged the landing of the chopper led to commotion and created law and order problems because of a stampede-like situation created by locals who had taken shelter on the road because of floods.
Earlier, the sub-divisional magistrate had dismissed his complaint on May 5, 2009.
Ojha then filed the revision petition in the court of the district judge, who transferred it to the court of the additional district and sessions judge for hearing on merit.
While Lalu Prasad was railway minister, Singh was the minister for rural development at that time.
