The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), probing the 2003 alleged fake encounter case of Sadik Jamal, today arrested one of the main accused - retired DySP K M Vaghela.
After his arrest, Mr. Vaghela was produced before the Special CBI court of additional chief judicial magistrate H S Khutwad, who sent him in judicial custody.
Earlier, the Special CBI court had issued a non bailable warrant (NBW) against him.
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Mr. Vaghela, a retired DySP, was police inspector in January 2003 with the Detection of Crime Branch (DCB), Ahmedabad and part of the team which allegedly killed Sadik, a resident of Bhavnagar, in a fake encounter on the outskirts of the city.
Mr. Vaghela, against whom the CBI had earlier filed a charge sheet in the case, was absconding.
In this case, CBI had so far arrested eight accused, including DySP Tarun Barot, six other policemen and former Mumbai journalist Ketan Tirodkar, who is on bail at present.
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With this, the number of present and former policemen who have been arrested in the case has gone up to eight and total number of arrests has gone to nine.
The genuineness of the encounter became an issue after Mumbai-based former journalist Ketan Tirodkar filed an affidavit before a court in Mumbai that he was witness to Jamal’s hand-over to Gujarat police by ‘encounter specialist’ officer Daya Nayak of Mumbai police, a few days before the alleged encounter.
In June 2011, the High Court had ordered a CBI probe upon a petition of Sabir Jamal, Sadik’s brother.