The Supreme Court, on Wednesday, rejected a request from convicted criminal-turned-politician Vijay Kumar Shukla, also known as Munna Shukla, who sought additional time to surrender in connection with the 1998 murder of former Bihar minister and RJD leader Brij Bihari Prasad.
A bench comprising Justices Sanjiv Khanna, Sanjay Kumar, and R Mahadevan heard senior advocate Vikas Singh, representing Shukla, who argued for a 30-day extension due to his wife’s health concerns and the need to manage family affairs. However, the court dismissed the plea, stating that the October 3 ruling, which allowed Shukla 15 days to surrender, provided adequate time, and no further leniency would be granted.
Earlier, on October 3, the Supreme Court convicted Shukla, a former MLA, and co-accused Mantu Tiwari in the murder case. The court had overturned a Patna High Court decision that had acquitted all accused and ordered Shukla and Tiwari to surrender within two weeks.
Tiwari is related to Bhupendra Nath Dubey, the brother of Devendra Nath Dubey, a political rival of Rama Devi, the widow of Brij Bihari Prasad. The court did, however, acquit five other accused individuals, including former MP Surajbhan Singh, citing reasonable doubt.
Prasad, an influential OBC leader, was murdered by the notorious Gorakhpur gangster Sri Prakash Shukla, whose killing by the Uttar Pradesh Special Task Force later caused an uproar in the police forces of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The case was handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on March 7, 1999, which accused former MP Surajbhan Singh and three others of conspiring in the crime.
The CBI’s investigation revealed that a meeting had taken place at Beur Jail in Patna, where Surajbhan Singh was detained along with Munna Shukla, Lallan Singh, and Ram Niranjan Chaudhary, shortly before Prasad’s murder on June 13, 1998.
In 2014, the Patna High Court acquitted all the accused, citing insufficient evidence, and overturned a 2009 trial court ruling that had sentenced them to life imprisonment. Meanwhile, Sri Prakash Shukla, Sudhir Tripathi, and Anuj Pratap were killed in an encounter by the Uttar Pradesh Police’s Special Task Force in September 1998.
According to the prosecution, Prasad was fatally shot by armed gunmen while taking a walk in the Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences in Patna, where he was receiving treatment while in judicial custody for his involvement in an alleged engineering college admission scam. Witnesses had testified that Prasad’s murder was an act of revenge for the 1994 killing of Chhotan Shukla, Munna Shukla’s elder brother, allegedly by Prasad’s men during the Bihar Assembly elections.
(With inputs from agency)
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