UP cop murder: Mulayam Singh accepts Raja Bhaiya resignation

Uttar Pradesh minister Raghuraj Pratap Singh alias Raja Bhaiya has submitted his resignation to UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, after being charged with ordering and carrying out the murder of Kunda DSP Zia-ul-Haq.

The resignation came shortly before the start of the budget session of the UP state assembly. Both the Congress and BSP have been demanding that he resign immediately.

Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav said that the state government had accepted the minister’s resignation.

This latest charge of murder had been registered against the minister by the slain officials ’s wife.

Haq had been sent to control a mob protesting against the killing of a village head and his brother in Ballipur village of Pratapgarh.

“On the directions of Raja Bhaiya, Nagar Panchayat Chairman Gulshan Yadav, minister’s representative Hari Om Srivastava, his driver Rohit Singh and supporter Guddu Singh first assaulted my husband with sticks and rods, and later shot him dead”, she said according to this report in the Economic Times.

IBN-Live reported that two of the minister’s aides have also been arrested based on the police officer’s wife’s complaint.

Hindustan Times reports that the Kunda police registered a first information report against Raja Bhaiya, the local MLA and food and civil supplies minister, under section 120(b) of the Indian Penal Code on the complaint of Haq’s wife Parveen Azad.

Raja Bhaiya, who is ironically the minister of jail affairs in Uttar Pradesh, has several charges registered against him, and spent five years in jail under the Mayawati government.

He was booked under Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) in 2002, but when the Mulayam Singh government came to power, the charges were dropped immediately. But in 2007, he went to jail under the Mayawati rule again.

The Akhilesh Yadav government too was kind to him and made him minister after it came to power in the 2012 state ass.