UK-based UP preacher booked over Pakistan links
LUCKNOW: The Enforcement Directorate has opened a money laundering case against Maulana Shamsul Huda Khan, a UK-based Islamic preacher from UP, after an FIR by the Anti-Terrorist Squad flagged alleged radical links and suspicious foreign funding. Khan, a native of Azamgarh, was appointed an assistant teacher in a government-aided madrassa in 1984 but left India in 2007, later settling in the UK and acquiring British citizenship by 2013. Despite living abroad, he allegedly continued to draw a salary for nearly a decade, earning around Rs 16 lakh, and later secured voluntary retirement with full benefits in 2017. Investigators say he fraudulently availed medical leave, updated service records, and remained on paper a serving employee while overseas. ED sources claim Khan amassed properties worth Rs 33 crore in Sant Kabir Nagar and deposited about Rs 5 crore in cash from suspicious entities. Multiple FIRs have been registered under cheating, forgery, FEMA provisions, and charges including concealment of foreign citizenship and waging war against India. An ATS report dated March 25, 2025, alleges he travelled frequently to Pakistan for dawah-related activities and maintained links with clerics and organisations in Lahore, Karachi, and Rawalpindi. The probe also flags interactions with separatist-leaning individuals in Jammu and Kashmir and attempts to build ideological influence in eastern Uttar Pradesh after 2017. Post-return, Khan established a girls madrassa in Khalilabad and floated two NGOs, which allegedly received foreign donations. Authorities sealed his madrassa campuses this year over financial irregularities, suspecting them to be operational nodes for foreign fund inflows. The government suspended four officials from the Minority Welfare Department, calling the case one of the most extraordinary instances of administrative collusion and systemic breakdown.
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