Dhanbad, Sept. 4: Jailed underworld don from eastern Uttar Pradesh Guddu Shukla was today sentenced by a lower court here in the murder of a police constable two years ago. The judge will pronounce the punishment term tomorrow.

Shukla, who unleashed a reign of terror in the coal belt with threat calls to local contractors, traders, businessmen and indistrialists, allegedly killed a constable, Chaturgun Manjhi, while he was being taken from the jail to the court for trial. After Manjhi was killed, Shukla escaped with the help of his accomplices. But he was later arrested from Bihar’s Motihari district.

A case was registered against him and his accomplices, Shiv Shankar Singh, Anil Singh, Narayan Sao, Himanshu Kumar, Balram Banerjee — with the Dhanbad Sadar police station on the basis of a complaint lodged by the in-charge of the police lock-up on the court premises, Devendra Pratap Rai.

Shukla was re-arrested and brought to Dhanbad. Altogether 25 witnesses, mostly policemen, had deposed as witnesses in the case. Except for Shukla, five other accused were set free by the lower court. The conviction has come as a shot in the arm for Dhanbad police for the don would now be transferred to either the Ranchi or the Hazaribagh Central jail.

Even while being lodged in Dhanbad divisional jail, Shukla was giving the district police and businessmen sleepless nights with threat calls for extortion. Police suspect that the calls were mostly made from cell phones from the jail since the callers asked the businessmen to come to the jail with the money.

Altogether 12 cases have been registered at six different police stations in the district in connection with the threat calls. The police provided security to at least two leading businessmen of the coal belt. Shukla and his men jolted the political circles with their confession that they had taken supaari from the coal mafia gangs for killing Marxist Coordination Committee A.K. Roy and party’s Nirsa legislator Arup Chatterjee.

While on a remand by the police, Shukla had confessed to his involvement in the Hotel Black Rock shootout last year in which the manager of the hotel, Satinath Rai, was gunned down. The don had reportedly told the police that he had allegedly killed the manager to terrorise hotel owner Sriram Katesaria, who was dilly-dallying over payment.