E-Paper
Bombay HC upholds acquittal of 22 in Sohrabuddin Shaikh fake encounter case
According to the CBI, Shaikh was killed on November 26, 2005, allegedly by a joint team comprising Gujarat and Rajasthan police
The Bombay High Court on Thursday dismissed an appeal filed by Rubabuddin Shaikh, challenging a Mumbai sessions court order acquitting 22 people, including several police personnel from Gujarat and Rajasthan, accused of kidnapping and killing his brother Sohrabuddin Shaikh and wife in an alleged staged encounter.
The division bench of chief justice Shree Chandrashekhar and justice Gautam Ankhad dismissed the appeals, saying no case was made out for interfering with the trial court verdict.
The case dates back to November 23, 2005, Sohrabuddin Shaikh, a wanted criminal, his wife Kausar Bi and his associate Tulsiram Prajapati, were allegedly abducted by accused policemen from a bus while they were traveling to Sangli in Maharashtra from Hyderabad. Their bus was intercepted by officers of the Gujarat and Rajasthan police at Zahirabad in Telangana and the trio was nabbed. Shaikh and Kausar Bi were taken to Gujarat while Prajapati, who was held in custody, was arrested from Bhilwara in Rajasthan on November 26, 2005.
According to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the police officers killed Sohrabuddin in a fake encounter on the intervening night of November 25, 2005 and November 26, 2005. Kausar Bi too was killed after that and her body was burnt on November 28, 2005. A year later, Prajapati who was lodged in an Udaipur jail was brought to Ahmedabad by the police in another case of firing and produced before a magistrate.
The CBI had said that Prajapati had expressed his fear of being eliminated in a police encounter to his jail inmates, lawyer and the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). On their journey back to Udaipur with Prajapati, the police had claimed he tried to flee with the help of two others who threw chilli powder at the police guards escorting Prajapati. At about 5am on December 28, 2006 Prajapati too was killed in an encounter which the CBI claimed was a farce. The CBI had alleged that the accused policemen wanted to kill Prajapati because he was a witness to the abduction of Sohrabuddin and Kausar Bi.
Also Read: Soharabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case: HC begins hearing appeal against acquittals
Twenty-two accused including policemen from Gujarat, Rajasthan and Hyderabad stood trial in the case for charges including murder, criminal conspiracy and others. They were acquitted by a special CBI court in Mumbai in 2018. According to the CBI that took over the investigation in the case in 2010 following directions of the Supreme Court, the accused policemen claimed that Shaikh was a member of
Lashkar-e-Toiba, a terror organisation, was killed in an encounter on November 26, 2005, when he was in Gujarat to murder a ‘big political leader’.
Shaikh’s brother, Rubabuddin, had written a letter to the Chief Justice of India in 2006, seeking an inquiry into the encounter that, he claimed, was fake. In 2006, based on the top court’s directions, when a preliminary inquiry was carried out in the case, the then Gujarat policeman VL Solanki sought to examine
Prajapati, claiming that he was a witness to Shaikh’s abduction. The CBI had said that Solanki had requested permission to examine Prajapati on December 18, 2006, but just ten days later, Prajapati was killed in a fake encounter on December 28, 2006, also in Gujarat. Prajapati’s mother, Narmadabai, also filed a petition before the Supreme Court, seeking an inquiry.
The trial in the case concluded on December 21, 2018 with the acquittal of all the accused. Of the 210 witnesses examined during the trial, 92 had turned hostile.
