In yet another setback to the Central Bureau of Investigation, probing the Sohrabuddin-Kausar Bi murder case, one of its key witnesses turned hostile on Thursday.
Sohrabuddin Sheikh was killed in a fake encounter by the Gujarat police in 2005. His wife was also abducted and killed.
In an affidavit before the designated CBI court here, Azam Khan, once a close associate of Sohrabuddin, claimed that the statements attributed to him against the former Deputy Police Commissioner of Ahmedabad, Abhay Chudasma, and others were “taken by the investigating agency under duress.” He also charged the CBI with “acting on the instructions of Congress leaders of Gujarat.”
Azam Khan, who was shot at and injured in his home town, Udaipur in Rajasthan, on September 14 and was hospitalised, submitted the affidavit in the special CBI court of A. Y. Dave in person. He is the third key CBI witness to have turned hostile, after Noor Ghoghari and Naemuddin, Sohrabuddin's younger brother, retracted their statements given to the CBI and filed affidavits in the court to this effect.
Threatened
Azam Khan said he was made to give a statement under threat from the CBI. He said he was told that he would be “rotting in the jail for life” if he did not make the statement. “I stayed with Sohrabuddin and his associate Tulsi Prajapati [who was also killed in an alleged fake encounter in 2006] but they never told me anything about extortion cases or Gujarat police.”
As for the statement attributed to him in the charge sheet against Mr. Chudasma and others, Azam Khan said: “I was threatened by the CBI and this statement was taken and it was never shown to me nor was I ever allowed to read it. I have never met Abhay Chudasama.” He claimed that even as he was signing the statement he overheard a CBI officer telling his superior that he (Azam Khan) had given the statement “exactly as Arjun Modhvadia [State Congress spokesman and former Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly] wanted us to get from him.”
Azam Khan said the CBI warned him that if he refused to give the statement it “wanted me to make,” he would be implicated in the murder of Hamid Lala (an alleged extortionist based in Udaipur) and in the case of firing in the office of Popular Builders in Ahmedabad, and he would be “rotting in the jails for lifetime.” He said he was made to sign 20 blank papers. “I have never claimed that there was any threat to my life but I was forced by the CBI to say this before a television channel.”
In a rebuttal, Mr. Modhvadia denied that he had ever meddled with the CBI probe and offered to submit before any investigating team the truth behind Azam Khan's allegations.
