A local Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader was shot dead by unidentified assailants on Thursday near Bodhpur village in Jaunpur district of Uttar Pradesh.
The killers stopped the car in which BJP leader Pramod Yadav was travelling on the pretext of giving him an invitation card and shot at him. “The killers fired four shots at the deceased. He was rushed to the hospital, where he was declared brought dead. Multiple teams are deployed to apprehend the assailants and police are investigating all possible angles,” said Brijesh Kumar Gautam, Additional Superintendent of Police (ASP), Jaunpur.
The incident happened under the limits of Sikrara police station.
Yadav, said to be in his 50s, had contested Assembly polls on a BJP ticket in 2012 and was considered an influential leader in the district. The daylight murder brought Jaunpur, an eastern U.P. district, in focus a day after the conviction of Dhananjay Singh, a criminal-turned-politician and former Lok Sabha member who represented the seat between 2009-14.
On March 6, an MP/MLA court sentenced Mr. Singh to seven years of imprisonment in a 2020 kidnapping and extortion case.
