CBI to file charge sheet in Prajapati killing in few days

New Delhi: The CBI told the Supreme Court on Tuesday it will file a charge sheet in a couple of days in the 2006 alleged staged shootout killing of Tulsiram Prajapati in Gujarat.

Senior CBI counsel Vivek Tankha said this to the apex court bench of Justice Aftab Alam and Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai in the course of the hearing of the agency’s plea challenging grant of bail to former Gujarat minister of state for home Amit Shah by the Gujarat High Court.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) also submitted a status report to the court in a sealed cover.

The investigating agency has sought the transfer of the trial in alleged gangster Sohrabuddin Shaikh’s staged shootout killing in 2005 from Gujarat to Mumbai.The court said that it would hear the investigating agency’s plea seeking the cancellation of bail and transfer of trial outside Gujarat on September 4.

The CBI has taken a stand that the killings of Shaikh and his aide, Tulsiram Prajapati, by Gujarat Police in separate incidents, were part of the same transaction.

The probe agency told the court that it had collected the phone call records showing the involvement of six to eight Andhra Pradesh cadre Indian Police Service (IPS) officers who had teamed up with Gujarat Police in shadowing Shaikh and his wife Kausar Bi during their stay in Hyderabad and subsequent travel to Sangli in Maharashtra on November 23, 2005.

Sohrabuddin was killed by Gujarat Police on November 25, 2005, in a staged shootout.

The CBI maintained that Parajapati was the third passenger who was taken off the bus along with Sohrabuddin and his wife while they were travelling from Hyderabad to Sangli.

Senior counsel Gopal Subramaniam wanted the CBI to look into the dimension if there was a police-politician nexus of a “slightly more intricate nature” in the Sohrabuddin and Prajapati case.

Subramaniam also asked why there were repeat first information reports (FIRs) when the officers of Gujarat Police had admitted that they were under pressure to take investigation in a particular direction.

He referred to a statement by Inspector V.L. Solanki, who investigated the case of the Sohrabuddin shootout and the killing of his wife, and the statement of senior Gujarat cadre IPS officer Geetha Johri.

The court decided to separate the Shaikh and Prajapti case with that of the CBI plea seeking the cancellation of Shah’s bail and transfer of the trial to Mumbai.

The CBI had contended that Shah was allegedly the head of an extortion racket having a politician-police-criminal nexus.