Sohrabuddin Shaikh’s brother Rubabuddin told the Bombay High Court on Tuesday that he wanted to withdraw his application challenging BJP president Amit Shah’s discharge from the Sohrabuddin Shaikh and Tulsiram Prajapati fake encounter case.
Time to rethinkHowever, Justice Anuja Prabhudesai gave him two weeks to think over his plea as the court felt that his decision was not “voluntary.”
Rubabuddin filed a petition in the High Court last month challenging the trial court’s decision last year to discharge Mr. Shah. Interestingly, he did not inform his lawyers of his decision to withdraw the petition and told the court that there was a communication gap with his lawyers.
“It is only when I saw him in court did I learn that he filed an affidavit for withdrawal. The court felt that Rubabuddin’s decision to withdraw was not voluntary and gave him time,” his lawyer Vijay Hiremath told The Hindu .
On December 30, 2014, a special CBI court here discharged Mr. Shah on the grounds that the charges were political, and for want of evidence.
Subsequently, the former Rajasthan Home Minister, Gulabchand Kataria; Rajasthan trader Vimal Patni; the former Gujarat Director-General of Police, P.C. Pande; and Additional Director-General of Police Geeta Johri were also discharged.
The Sohrabuddin case was transferred to Mumbai in September 2012. Sohrabuddin, a gangster with alleged links to the terror outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba, was killed by the Gujarat police in a staged shootout on November 25, 2005.
Two days later, his wife Kausar Bi was killed. His aide Tulsiram Prajapati was murdered on December 28, 2006. Shah was a Gujarat minister at the time. As there were links between the Sohrabuddin and Prajapati cases, the Supreme Court clubbed them in 2013.
