Daijiworld Media Network - Rampur

Rampur, Nov 17: Samajwadi Party leader Azam Khan and his son Abdullah Khan faced a major legal setback on Monday as a Special MP-MLA Court in Rampur sentenced both to seven years in prison for possessing two PAN cards with different dates of birth, a lawyer confirmed.

Abdullah Khan was found guilty of creating a second PAN card with a falsified date of birth to artificially increase his age, enabling him to meet the minimum age requirement to contest elections. The court ruled that Azam Khan was involved in the broader conspiracy. After the verdict, the father-son duo was taken into custody.

The case dates back to 2019, when local leader Akash Kumar Saxena lodged a complaint with the Civil Lines Police Station alleging fraud, forgery, and criminal conspiracy. According to the complaint, Abdullah’s first PAN card listed his birth date as January 1, 1993, while the second showed September 30, 1990. Saxena alleged that forged documents were used to obtain these PAN cards for electoral and income tax purposes.

The court found that Abdullah, then underage, had deliberately manipulated his age using forged documents to qualify for elections.

This verdict comes shortly after Abdullah Khan’s petition to quash an FIR related to a forged passport was dismissed by the Supreme Court on November 6. The bench, led by Justice M.M. Sundresh, had stated that the trial court should decide the matter independently and that the offences of obtaining a forged birth certificate and using it for a passport were separate and distinct acts.

Abdullah Khan had previously been convicted for obtaining a false birth certificate using fabricated documents. He had argued that subsequent prosecution amounted to double jeopardy, a claim rejected by the courts.

This ruling marks another significant legal blow to Azam Khan, who had recently been released in a separate case.