The Supreme Court wanted to know what could be the motive of the Andhra Pradesh police in helping its Gujarat counterparts to carry out the encounter killings of alleged gangster Sohrabuddin Sheikh, his wife Kauser Bi and another person.
"What was the motive of the Andhra Pradesh police to join the conspiracy? What could have actuated their action when it was not officially done?" a bench of Justices Tarun Chatterjee and Aftab Alam asked Solicitor General Gopal Subramaniam who is acting as an amicus curaie (friend of the court) in the matter. The bench posed the query in response to the allegation by Subramaniam that the AP police had given logistic support to the Gujarat police in carrying out the killings.
The apex court's query assumes significance since AP is ruled by Congress and Gujarat by the Bharatiya Janata Party. Sohrabuddin, along with his wife Kauser Bi and their friend Tulsiram Prajapati, was picked in a joint operation by the police of Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh from a bus on their way from Hyderabad to Sangli in Maharashtra on Novemeber 22, 2005. Besides the AP police, the role of the Rajasthan police also figured during the investigations conducted so far into the killings. The amicus curiae, who sought transfer of the investigations to an independent investigating agency like the Central Bureau of Investigation or the Special Investigation Team, submitted that the AP police had a definite role in extending help to the Gujarat police in carrying out the killings.
The amicus, however, said the AP police had disowned any type of official support to the encounter or rather the state took the plea that the encounter might have been conducted with the "illegal" help of some of its officers. The allegation is that the two vehicles carrying police personnel from Andra Pradesh had escorted the three victims from the state to Gujarat to facilitate the killings.
The amicus charged there were a number of loose ends in the investigations now being conducted by the Gujarat police as the state government had been consistently making efforts to shield the accused. "In a case where investigations have never been fair and where the state has not been fair in the advancement of the course of justice, we must have thorough investigations into the incidents as police officers are involved in the murder," Subramaniam said. He submitted that due to consistent efforts by Gujarat government to shield the actual culprits, no efforts had been made till date to establish how Sohrabuddin's wife Kauser Bi and the couple's accomplice Tulsiram Prajapati had been killed.
The amicus pointed out that Inspector Solanki of the Gujarat Criminal Investigation Department, who had conducted preliminary investigations into the fake encounters, had recorded a number of crucial statements linking top police officers of the state to the killings but the report has neither been submitted in the apex court nor formed part of the chargesheet filed in the trial court
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