Sohrabuddin Sheikh murder case

The Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case is an ongoing criminal case in the Gujarat state of India, after the death of Sohrabuddin Anwarhussain Sheikh on November 26, 2005, while he was in police custody.

Apart from being involved in the criminal extortion racket in Gujarat, Sheikh was also involved in arms smuggling in Madhya Pradesh, and also had murder cases registered against him in Gujarat and Rajasthan. Sheikh was also claimed by the police to be associated with the banned global terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Pakistani intelligence agency Inter-Services Intelligence, and was alleged to have planned to create communal chaos in the state by assassinating "an important political leader". Although the target of Sheikh's plans has never been officially revealed, the impression was given to political effect that it was to have been Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi. Sheikh's wife Kauser Bi also disappeared on the same day as his killing. A year later, on December 26, 2006, Sheikh's associate Tulsiram Prajapati, a witness to Sheikh's killing, was also killed in another police encounter shooting.

Sheikh was alleged by the police to be extorting protection money from local marble factories in Gujarat and Rajasthan. He was also claimed to have links to fellow underworld criminals Sharifkhan Pathan, Abdul Latif, Rasool Parti and Brajesh Singh, who were all members and associates of India's largest organized crime network and underworld mafia operated by Dawood Ibrahim. During investigations before he was arrested, the Anti-Terror Squad (ATS) of the Gujarat police claimed to have found 40 AK-47 assault rifles from his village residence in Madhya Pradesh.

The state government's lawyer, KTS Tulsi, later submitted something to the Supreme Court saying that "the preliminary inquiry has found that it was a fake encounter." Such encounters are known in India as encounter killings, and in this case, as "fake encounters". It is alleged that the killing was orchestrated by senior police officers and at the behest of Gujarat's Home minister Amit Shah. Shah is the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party government and a close confidant of Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India. Modi, as well as Gulab Chand Kataria, a senior BJP leader and ex-minister from the neighbouring state of Rajasthan, have also been investigated in the matter. More than 10 police officers were subsequently arrested for the killings of Sheikh and Prajapati and many of them have been let go scot-free. Also, Yashpal Chudasama, a former director of the Ahmedabad District Cooperative Bank and an aide of Amit Shah, was chargesheeted by the CBI in 2010 for attempting to “convince, coerce, threaten, and influence witnesses on [Amit Shah’s] behalf to conceal the truth from the CBI” about the fake encounter of Sohrabuddin and his wife Kauser-bi. In 2015, a special CBI court discharged Chudasama from the case, just as it had discharged Amit Shah too in December 2014.

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