2005 fake encounter of Sohrabuddin Shaikh: HC upholds acquittal of 22 people 

Among the 22 accused acquitted, 21 were junior-level officers from Gujarat and Rajasthan police.

Mumbai: The Bombay High Court on Thursday, May 7, upheld the acquittal of the 22 accused in the 2005 case of the alleged fake encounter of gangster Sohrabuddin Shaikh, his wife Kausar Bi and his aide Tulsiram Prajapati.

A bench of Chief Justice Shree Chandrashekhar and Justice Gautam Ankhad dismissed the appeals filed by Shaikh’s brothers, Rubabuddin and Nayabuddin, challenging the December 2018 judgment of a special court acquitting all the accused in the case.

Among the 22 accused acquitted, 21 were junior-level officers from Gujarat and Rajasthan police, who were allegedly part of the teams that abducted the three and later killed them in staged encounters.

The remaining one accused was the owner of a farmhouse in Gujarat, where Shaikh and Kausar Bi were allegedly illegally detained before they were killed.

Prosecution failed to establish case: Special court

The special court, while acquitting the accused, had observed that the prosecution failed to establish a cogent case to suggest there had been any conspiracy to kill Shaikh and the others, and that the present accused persons had any role in it.

In April 2019, Shaikh’s brothers filed an appeal in the High Court. The prosecuting agency, Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), told the court last year that it had accepted the acquittal judgment and was not going to appeal.

The killing and the alleged conspiracy

Sohrabuddin Sheikh was an alleged gangster with ties to organised crime networks operating across Gujarat, Rajasthan and Maharashtra. According to the CBI, he and his wife Kausar Bi were intercepted on the night of November 22-23, 2005, while travelling by bus from Hyderabad to Sangli, by a joint team of Gujarat and Rajasthan police personnel.

The two were separated and taken away in different vehicles. Sohrabuddin was killed on November 26, 2005, in what the agency alleged was a staged encounter near Ahmedabad. Kausar Bi was killed three days later. Their aide Tulsiram Prajapati, considered a key eyewitness to the killings, was eliminated in another alleged encounter on the Gujarat-Rajasthan border in December 2006.

The CBI’s case rested on the theory that the killings were not a legitimate police action but a premeditated conspiracy involving senior police officers and local politicians. Central to the prosecution’s narrative was the alleged existence of a nexus between the police teams and political figures, some of whom were named as accused but later discharged from the case. Among those discharged was Amit Shah, then Gujarat’s minister of state for home, who was the prime accused before the charges against him were dropped in 2014.

The motive attributed by investigators was that Sohrabuddin had allegedly been involved in extortion activities that had disturbed certain business and political interests in the region, and that powerful figures wanted him eliminated. The Supreme Court, unconvinced that a fair trial could be conducted in Gujarat, transferred the case to Maharashtra in 2012 and ordered that the same judge hear it from start to finish, an order that was later violated when the original presiding judge was transferred.

The case drew renewed and darker attention following the death of Judge Brijgopal Harkishan Loya, who was presiding over the CBI special court hearing the trial. Loya died in Nagpur on December 1, 2014, under circumstances his family described as deeply suspicious — including bloodstains on his clothing that contradicted the post-mortem report, questions about the post-mortem timeline and an unidentified person who signed the report as a paternal cousin of the deceased, a claim Loya’s father denied.

The cause of death was recorded as cardiac arrest, but his family maintained he had no cardiac history. No inquiry commission was ever constituted to probe his death.

(With PTI inputs)