New Delhi

The Supreme Court on Monday issued notice on a plea challenging the Bombay High Court’s decision upholding the acquittal of 22 accused in the 2005 Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case, including 21 policemen from Gujarat, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh.

A bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana sought responses from the acquitted persons. 

The bench indicated that it would examine whether the acquittal was justified.

“We would like to see statements of some witnesses. We are not summoning the record. You give us whatever 3-4 statements you feel are vital. We will examine the acquittal,” the CJI said during the hearing.

The bench made it clear that it would not undertake an examination of every aspect of the trial.

Justice Bagchi expressed concern over the large number of witnesses who had turned hostile during the trial.

“92 witnesses turning hostile is a concern. Whether there was a fair and just trial, that's to be considered,” Justice Bagchi observed.

Rubabuddin Shaikh and Nayabuddin Shaikh, younger brothers of the deceased Sohrabuddin Sheikh, have approached the apex court challenging the High Court order by which it had, on May 7, dismissed appeals against the acquittal of all the accused. 

The High Court had said that the prosecution had failed to establish the case and observed that it found no ground to interfere with the trial court judgment acquitting the accused. 

It had added that the prosecution case is based on circumstantial evidence and there are several broken links in the chain of circumstances.

The High Court had dismissed the appeals filed by Rubabuddin and Nayabuddin against the December 2018 judgment of a special CBI court in Mumbai acquitting all the accused in the case.

The case concerns the alleged killings of Sohrabuddin Sheikh, his wife Kausar Bi and his associate Tulsiram Prajapati. 

According to the prosecution, Sheikh and the others were taken into custody by a police team while travelling by bus from Hyderabad to Maharashtra on the night of November 22-23, 2005.

Sheikh was subsequently killed in an alleged encounter near Ahmedabad on November 26, while Kausar Bi was allegedly killed three days later. Prajapati, considered a key eyewitness to the encounters, was killed in a separate alleged encounter on the Gujarat-Rajasthan border on December 27, 2006.

Among the 22 accused acquitted, 21 were junior-level officers from Gujarat and Rajasthan police, who were part of the teams that allegedly abducted the three and later killed them in staged encounters.

The remaining one accused was the owner of a farmhouse in Gujarat, where Shaikh and his wife Kausar Bi were allegedly illegally detained before they were killed.

The Supreme Court had earlier transferred the investigation from the Gujarat CID to the CBI and shifted the trial from Gujarat to Mumbai. 

In December 2018, the Special CBI Court in Mumbai acquitted all the accused, holding that the prosecution had failed to establish a credible conspiracy to eliminate Sheikh and the others.

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The acquittal was challenged before the Bombay High Court in 2019. In 2013, the apex court had clubbed the alleged fake encounter case of Prajapati with that of Sheikh.

The case saw 92 prosecution witnesses out of the total 210 turn against the prosecution.