Author: Swati Deshpade
Publication: The Times of India
Date: May 9, 2026

While upholding the 2018 acquittal of 21 police officers and one guesthouse owner in the Sohrabuddin Shaikh ‘fake encounter’ case, the Bombay high court reasoned on Thursday that the very “foundation of the prosecution story is not established at all.” The prosecution failed to establish the abduction of Sohrabuddin and his wife Kausar Bi and his associate Tulsiram Prajapati by Gujarat and Rajasthan police and their illegal detentions a farmhouse and a guesthouse and the alleged fake encounter in Nov 2005.

HC Chief Justice Shree Chandrashekhar and Justice Gautam Ankhad in a 50-page judgment uploaded late Thursday night dismissed appeals filed by two brothers of Shaikh against the acquittal which they had said was a “miscarriage of justice.”

The acquittal was based “unwarranted assumptions and manifestly erroneous appreciation of evidence,” the brothers’ counsel Gautam Tiwari had argued. The HC, analysing the record and submissions in the context of criminal jurisprudence and legal precedents, held that the “trial court applied the correct” legal principles and its appreciation of evidence was not flawed. Its settled law that acquittal judgement requires higher threshold to rebut the presumption of innocence and acquittals, by law, cannot be overturned in a "casual or cavalier manner," the court said.

Gujarat and Rajasthan police were booked for allegedly staging the encounter of gangster Sohrabuddin Shaikh on Nov 26, 2005 and also of Tulsiram Prajapati in Gujarat on Dec 28, 2006. The police aslo faced trial for the killing and disappearance of Sohrabuddin’s wife Kauser Bi.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) was the prosecuting agency in the case. There were no direct witnesses who saw the alleged encounter, the HC observed and found that the circumstantial evidence had broken links in the chain of circumstance, while to prove a case, the chain needs to be whole.

“We do not see any ground to hold that prosecution has established by circumstantial evidence the complicity of the respondent nos. 2 to 23 in the conspiracy to murder, Sohrabuddin Shaikh, Kausar Bi end Tulsiram Prajapati by projecting a case of fake encounter,” the HC said.

Of over 200 prosecution witnesses, 92 went hostile. The HC found hostile witnesses were put to intense cross-examination but it elicited nothing to back the case against the accused policemen.

The trial court had said that the police officers discharging official duty and a legal mandate of a prior sanction to prosecute them was unmet.

“The discharge of 16 accused persons against whom the prosecution relied on the same set of evidence cannot be overlooked. That decision of the trial court has now become final. The very foundation of the prosecution case is demolished and the conspiracy theory must be held not proved,” the HC judgment authored by CJ Chandrashekhar said.

It added that senior counsel Amit Desai for several acquitted accused had “submitted that from the very beginning the prosecution theory aligned with a particular narrative with strong political overtones and attempted to foist liability on a particular political person and a select group of police officers. The investigation was done by a different investigating agency which is said to be highly skilled and equipped with scientific investigation and the trial was conducted in a state where the ruling party was different.”