All 22 accused in Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case acquitted

Mumbai: The special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court on Friday acquitted all the 22 accused in 2005 Sohrabuddin Sheikh and 2006 Tulsiram Prajapati fake encounter case and of the charge of killing Sheikh’s wife Kausar Bi. The judge held that there was lack of evidence to prove the charges against the accused beyond reasonable doubt.

Special CBI judge S.J. Sharma observed that the prosecution failed to establish that there had been any conspiracy to kill Sheikh and others and that the accused had a role in the conspiracy.

Judge Sharma said in his ruling that the court felt sorry for the families of Sheikh and Prajapati as “three lives were lost”, but the system demands that the court go solely by evidence. “....I am helpless,” the judge said.

The judge also noted that 92 prosecution witnesses out of the 210 examined by the prosecution had turned hostile. According to the judge, some important witnesses did not stand by their statement to the police in the past and this had a strong impact on the prosecution’s case. The case remained on circumstantial evidence and hearsay and as a result the chain of events was not complete enough to believe that the encounter was the result of a criminal conspiracy, according to the judge. “What could have prosecution done? It couldn’t have forced them not to turn hostile,” said the judge in open court while talking about reasons that led to the acquittal of all the accused. The judge said that the prosecution made sincere efforts to prove its case. However, it could not bring on record some relevant documentary evidence and reliable witnesses, as statements of some witnesses were hearsay on which court cannot rely upon,” he said.

The judge said that though Sheikh and others had been killed, “going by the evidence on record, the court could not conclude that the present accused persons could be questioned or held accountable for those deaths.”

Special public prosecutor B.P. Raju said he could not comment before perusing the judgment. He, however, in the past had told the judge that, initially, the local police handled the case, then it was transferred to a special investigating team of the state CID and it was finally transferred to the CBI. He had said that the case came to CBI after a long gap and it was a very difficult task to investigate the matter further. 

While pronouncing the judgment, the judge also spoke about former DIG D.G. Vanzara who had already been discharged from the case in August 2017. The judge said that it was improbable that Vanzara could have any knowledge of the alleged conspiracy. The CBI’s case is that it was Vanz-ara who called Gujarat police officer Ashish Pa-ndya, who was on leave at that time, to lead Praja-pati’s encounter. Howe-ver, according to the ju-dge, the CBI could not br-ing on record any subs-tantial piece of evidence.

The judge also expressed disbelief in the theory that Prajapati was the third person that was abducted along with Sheikh and his wife from a luxury bus and that he was witness to the abduction of Sheikh and Kausar Bi. Since the court discarded this theory, the judge also disbelieved that Prajapati was killed in a fake encounter to eliminate the eyewitness in Sheikh’s case. 

The CBI had charge-sheeted 38 accused of whom 16 accused, including Vanzara, BJP president Amit Shah, Rajasthan home minister Gulabchand Kataria, Rajasthan-based businessman Vimal Patni, former Gujarat police chief P.C. Pande, additional director general of police Geetha Johri, Gujarat police officer Abhay Chudasama, Gujarat police official N.K. Amin, Yashpal Chudasama and Ajay Patel (both senior office-bearers at the Ahmedabad District Co-Operative Bank), Gujarat IPS officer Rajkumar Pandiyan and Andra Pradesh cadre IPS official N. Balasubramanyam, were discharged before the commencement of trial.

In total, 22 accused faced trial. Of them, only one, Jeerawala — the owner of Arham farmhouse, is a civilian and all the policemen are junior police officers and constables.

The prosecution’s case is that the Gujarat police abducted Sheikh, an alleged gangster, his wife Kausar Bi and his aide Prajapati from a bus when the trio was on their way to Sangli in Maharashtra from Hyderabad on the night of November 22, 2005.

Sheikh was killed in an alleged fake encounter on November 26, 2005, near Ahmedabad. His wife was killed three days later and her body was disposed of, the CBI said. The agency claimed that a year later, on December 27, 2006, the Gujarat and Rajasthan police shot Prajapati dead in an alleged fake encounter near Chapri on the Gujarat-Rajasthan border.