Atiq Ahmed (10 August 1962-15 April 2023) was an Indian gangster and left-wing politician who served as a member of the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly from 1989 to 2004 and of the Lok Sabha from 2004 to 2009.
Biography[]
Atiq Ahmed was born in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, India in 1962, the son of a Muslim horse-cart driver and the brother of Ashraf Ahmed. He initially stole coal from trains and sold it for profit, and he also extorted contractors before being arrested for murder in 1979. By the 1990s, he became known as a powerful extortionist, kidnapper, and murderer in Allahabad, and he served in the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly from 1989 to 2004 as a Samajwadi Party and Apna Dal politician, alternating between the two parties. In 2007, he was expelled from the Samajwadi Party for covering up a rape that had occurred at a madrassa, and he unsuccessfully ran for the legislative assembly from jail in 2012 (having murdered Bahudan Samaj Party political candidate Raju Pal). In 2014, he was welcomed back into the Samajwadi Party, but he was convicted of kidnapping in 2019. He defected to the conservative AIMIM party in 2021, and he and his brother were shot dead by three masked Hindu vigilantes during a press conference in April 2023.