Mumbai
All 22 accused in the alleged fake encounter killings of gangster Sohrabuddin Shaikh, his wife Kausar Bi and his aide Tulsi Prajapati were acquitted today by a special CBI court because of insufficient evidence, even as it expressed sorrow over the loss of “three lives”.

“I am helpless,” Special CBI Judge SJ Sharma said, adding that the proof submitted by the investigating agency was not substantial enough to hold anyone guilty.
He said the system demands that the court go solely by evidence, and observed that the prosecution had failed to establish a cogent case to suggest that there was any conspiracy to kill the three, or that the accused had any role in it.

All the accused, mostly police officials from Gujarat and Rajasthan, were out on bail during the year-long trial. The 13-year-old case saw several twists and turns, including 92 prosecution witnesses turning hostile. At one point, BJP chief Amit Shah was also arrested briefly in 2010 before being discharged in 2014. Sharma said while there was no denying that Shaikh and the others were 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”.

The three victims, who were returning to Sangli in Maharashtra from Hyderabad in a bus, were taken into custody on the night of November 22-23, 2005. The couple were taken in one vehicle and Prajapati in another. CBI said Shaikh was killed on November 26, allegedly by a joint team of Gujarat and Rajasthan police, and Kausar Bi three days later.

Prajapati, who was lodged in an Udaipur jail, was killed in an encounter on the Gujarat-Rajasthan border on December 27, 2006. Of the 22 accused, 21 are junior police officers from Gujarat and Rajasthan, who the CBI said were part of the teams that abducted the three and later killed them in staged encounters. The remaining accused was the owner of the farmhouse in Gujarat where Shaikh and Kausar Bi were illegally detained before being killed.

When the CBI took over the case, it had charged 38 persons, including Amit Shah, who was then Gujarat Home Minister, Gulabchand Kataria, the then Rajasthan Home Minister, and senior IPS officers like DG Vanzara and PC Pande. The prosecution had examined 210 witnesses, of whom 92 turned hostile.