The Bombay High Court on Thursday dismissed an appeal filed by Ruba Uddin Sheikh, challenging the Mumbai Sessions Court’s order acquitting 22 people, including several police personnel from Gujarat and Rajasthan, accused of kidnapping and killing his brother Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife in an alleged staged encounter.
A bench of Chief Justice Shri Chandrashekhar and Justice Gautam Ankhad dismissed the appeals, saying no case had been filed to interfere with the lower court’s ruling.
The case dates back to November 23, 2005, where Sohrabuddin Sheikh, a wanted criminal, his wife Kausar B and his accomplice Tulsiram Prajapati were allegedly kidnapped by accused cops from a bus while traveling to Sangli in Maharashtra from Hyderabad. Their bus was intercepted by Gujarat and Rajasthan Police officers at Zahirabad in Telangana and the three were arrested. Shaikh and Kausar P were transferred to Gujarat while Prajapati, who was in custody, was arrested from Bhilwara in Rajasthan on 26 November 2005.
According to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), police officers killed Sohrabuddin in a fake encounter on the intervening night of November 25, 2005, and November 26, 2005. Kausar Bi was also killed thereafter and her body was cremated on November 28, 2005. A year later, police brought Prajapati, who was lodged in an Udaipur jail, to Ahmedabad in another shooting case and was produced before the court. a judge.
The CBI said Prajapati expressed his fear of being eliminated in the police encounter to his jail inmates, his lawyer and the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). On his return trip to Udaipur with Prajapati, police claimed he tried to escape with the help of two others who threw chilli powder at the police guards who were escorting Prajapati. At around 5 am on 28 December 2006, Prajapati was also killed in an encounter which the CBI claimed was a farce. The CBI claimed that the accused policemen wanted to kill Prajapati because he had witnessed the kidnapping of Sohrabuddin and Kausar B.
Read also: Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case: HC begins hearing appeal against acquittals
Twenty-two accused, including policemen from Gujarat, Rajasthan and Hyderabad, were put on trial in this case on charges including murder, criminal conspiracy and others. They were acquitted by a special CBI court in Mumbai in 2018. According to the CBI which took over the investigation in the case in 2010 on the directions of the Supreme Court, the accused cops claimed that Sheikh was a member of
Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist organisation, was killed in an encounter on November 26, 2005, when he was in Gujarat to kill a “senior political leader”.
Sheikh’s brother, Rab Uddin, had written a letter to the Chief Justice of India in 2006, requesting an investigation into the encounter which he claimed was fake. In 2006, on the directions of the Supreme Court, when a preliminary investigation was conducted into the case, the then Gujarat policeman, V L Solanki, sought to investigate the matter.
Prajapati claiming that he witnessed Sheikh’s kidnapping. The CBI said Solanki sought 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 Narmadabhai also filed a petition in the Supreme Court, demanding a probe.
The trial in the case ended on December 21, 2018, with the acquittal of all defendants. Of the 210 witnesses questioned during the trial, 92 turned hostile.
