A petition has been filed before the Supreme Court challenging the Bombay High Court judgment upholding the acquittal of 22 accused in the 2005 encounter case involving Sohrabuddin Shaikh, his wife Kausar Bi, and his aide Tulsiram Prajapati. The accused include 21 policemen from Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Andhra Pradesh.
Plea by Sohrabuddin’s brother
The plea was filed on August 13 by Nayabuddin Shaikh, the younger brother of Sohrabuddin Shaikh, reported Live Law. He has challenged the Mumbai High Court judgment dismissing appeals against the acquittal.
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According to the prosecution, Shaikh, Kausar Bi, and Prajapati were abducted by a police team in 2005 while travelling by bus from Hyderabad to Maharashtra.
Sohrabuddin was allegedly killed in an encounter near Ahmedabad, followed by Kausar Bi’s death three days later. Prajapati was killed in another encounter on the Gujarat-Rajasthan border in 2006.
Case moved to CBI
The Supreme Court transferred the investigation from the Gujarat Crime Investigation Department (CID) to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and ordered the trial to be shifted from Gujarat to Mumbai. Prajapati’s encounter case was also clubbed with Shaikh’s case.
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Of 210 witnesses examined by the prosecution, 92 turned hostile. In 2018, the Special CBI Court in Mumbai acquitted all the accused, holding that the prosecution had failed to establish a cogent case of conspiracy to kill Shaikh and the others.
High Court upholds acquittal
An appeal against the acquittal was filed before the Bombay High Court in 2019. In Rubabuddin Shaikh v Central Bureau of Investigation, the High Court declined to interfere with the trial court’s judgment, observing that the prosecution relied on circumstantial evidence with “several broken links in the chain of circumstances.”
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The High Court stated that the prosecution failed to establish that Shaikh and Kausar Bi were abducted by police or that there was a motive to stage a fake encounter.
It also held that the presence of hostile witnesses did not, by itself, establish that the trial was improperly conducted. The court further found no evidence of a politician-police nexus behind the alleged encounters.