2005 Sohrabuddin Encounter: Brother Knocks On Supreme Court Doors After High Court Clears 21 Cops

The high-profile legal battle surrounding the 2005 extrajudicial killing of Sohrabuddin Shaikh has reached the apex court once again. Nayabuddin Shaikh, the brother of the deceased, has moved the Supreme Court of India to challenge a Bombay High Court ruling that upheld the acquittal of 22 accused, including 21 police personnel from Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Andhra Pradesh.

Filed under Diary Number 49466/2026 by Advocate Achint Kumar, the petition contests the verdict delivered by a division bench comprising Chief Justice Shree Chandrashekhar and Justice Gautam Ashwin Ankhad. The High Court had dismissed the appeal against a 2018 Special CBI Court order that set free all the accused due to lack of evidence.

Abduction, Extrajudicial Killings, and a Shifted Trial

The origins of the case date back to November 2005, when Sohrabuddin Shaikh, his wife Kausar Bi, and his associate Tulsiram Prajapati were intercepted by a joint police team while travelling on a luxury bus from Hyderabad to Maharashtra.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) alleged that Sohrabuddin was taken into custody and shot dead in a staged encounter near Ahmedabad shortly after the interception. Kausar Bi was allegedly held in illegal confinement before being murdered three days later. Prajapati, a key eyewitness to the abduction, was subsequently killed in another encounter near the Gujarat-Rajasthan border in December 2006 under the pretext that he was attempting to flee custody.

Given the political sensitivities and allegations of state interference, the Supreme Court had previously stripped the Gujarat Crime Investigation Department (CID) of the probe, handing the case over to the CBI and transferring the trial out of Gujarat to Mumbai to ensure a fair judicial process.

Why the High Court Refused to Interfere

Reviewing the lower court's findings in the appeal titled Rubabuddin Shaikh v Central Bureau of Investigation, the Bombay High Court concluded that the prosecution’s narrative was built on circumstantial evidence plagued by "several broken links in the chain of circumstances."

In upholding the acquittals, the bench highlighted multiple fatal flaws in the case presented by federal investigators:

• Unproven Abduction: The CBI failed to present conclusive proof establishing that police officers had physically intercepted or abducted the trio from the bus.
• Lack of Motive: Investigators could not establish a clear motive for the police officers to execute a planned extrajudicial killing.
• Hostile Witnesses: Although 92 out of 210 prosecution witnesses turned hostile during the trial, the High Court held that a high witness turncoat rate does not ipso facto mean the trial was compromised or improperly conducted.
• No Political-Police Nexus: The court noted an absence of evidence proving the existence of a high-level conspiracy involving politicians and law enforcement agents.

The Final Legal Frontier

Nayabuddin Shaikh’s petition before the Supreme Court argues that both the trial court and the High Court overlooked critical material facts regarding the abduction and the sequence of events leading to the three deaths.

The family contends that widespread witness intimidation severely impaired the prosecution's ability to prove its case, leading directly to key witnesses backing out during trial proceedings. By taking the matter to the top court, the family seeks a fresh judicial review of the acquittals, challenging the relief granted to the 21 officers and a farmhouse owner accused of facilitating the illegal detentions.