Mumbai: The Bombay high court (HC) on Friday asked the CBI to confirm if the four police officers, who were accompanying Sohrabuddin Sheikh’s aide, Tulsiram Prajapati to Ahmedabad just days before the latter’s death in an alleged fake encounter in December 2006, had gone with him as his escort team on previous occasions too. Sheikh was earlier killed in an alleged fake encounter in November 2005.
Justice Revati Mohite-Dere raised this query after Rajasthan IPS officer Dinesh M.N.’s lawyer Raja Thakre told the court that his client had no role to play in choosing the escort team which accompanied Prajapati to Ahmedabad for a court hearing. According to the accused policemen, Prajapati escaped from train and was later killed in the encounter.
Meanwhile, the trial court in Sohrabuddin’s fake encounter case on Friday issued a non-bailable warrant against Balkrishna Coubey, as he did not appear before the court. The CBI has claimed that Prajapati did not travel by train at the time of incident as nobody travelling in the train had seen him. Though the investigating agency has failed to answer how Prajapati reached the spot where he was killed from Udaipur jail where he was kept.
Inspector Narayan Singh, ASI Yudhveer Singh and constables Dalpat Singh Rathod and Kartar Singh, from the Surajpol police station in Udaipur, were part of the escort team that had accompanied Prajapati from Udaipur Central Jail to Ahmedabad for the court hearing.
Advocate Thakre argued that the jail officials had asked for an escort team because they did not have adequate number of policemen with them, On their request, Dinesh had directed the Surajpol police to send a team of policemen to escort Prajapati to Ahmedabad. According to him, Dinesh did not know the policemen who were accompanying Prajapati. “Even if it is presumed for a minute that there was a conspiracy to kill Prajapati, I could not have played any role in it,” said Thakre on behalf of Dinesh.
Justice Mohite-Dere, however, remarked that some of the compilations of witness statements submitted by Rubabuddin Shaikh, the brother of Sohrabuddin, had pointed out that the same team of four officials had travelled with Prajapati between Gujarat and Rajasthan for court hearings.
