Sohrabuddin Sheikh’s brother challenges acquittal of accused in staged encounter killing in Supreme Court

The Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case, in which Union Home Minister Amit Shah was named over his involvement in the alleged staged encounter killing of Sheikh, his wife and his aide Tulsiram Prajapati, and was acquitted later, has returned to the Supreme Court with his brother Nayabuddin Sheikh’s petition challenging the Bombay High Court’s upholding of the acquittal of 22 accused, including 21 police officers.

The petition, filed by Nayabuddin in the Supreme Court on August 13, has sought judicial scrutiny of the findings in the Bombay High Court’s May 7 judgment that had upheld the trial court’s decision to acquit all the accused for lack of sufficient evidence.

Sohrabuddin Sheikh, a wanted criminal as per the authorities, was allegedly killed in a staged encounter by the Gujarat Police in November 2005, as per the investigators. The prosecution argued that Sheikh and Kausar Bi were travelling by bus from Hyderabad to Sangli in Maharashtra when they were allegedly intercepted and abducted by the Gujarat and Rajasthan Police, who allegedly shot him dead near Gandhinagar.

The prosecution also told the court that after Sheikh’s death, his wife Kausar Bi was raped by a constable before being killed, and the sole witness to the killings, Prajapati, had been in police custody before he was also killed in the encounter, as per the police claim, when he had tried to escape custody in December 2006.

In December 2018,, a special Central Bureau of Investigation court acquitted all 22 accused, holding that the prosecution had failed to establish the alleged criminal conspiracy beyond reasonable doubt. Among those acquitted was Amit Shah, now India’s Union Home Minister.

During the trial, 210 witnesses were examined, of whom 92 were declared hostile. Nayabuddin and another of Sheikh’s brothers, Rubabuddin Sheikh, challenged the acquittals before the Bombay High Court in 2019, arguing that the trial was flawed and that some witness statements were not properly recorded.

The High Court, however, found several “broken links” in the chain of circumstantial evidence. It held that the prosecution had failed to establish that Sheikh and Kausar Bi had been abducted by the police or to prove a motive for staging the alleged encounter. The court also found no evidence of a politician-police nexus behind the killings.