After handing over Gujarat’s Sohrabuddin and Tulsriram Prajapati “fake encounter” cases to the CBI earlier, the Supreme Court on Wednesday asked the state government-appointed monitoring authority on high-profile cases to examine the allegedly stage-managed killings of 19 others, most of them hardcore criminals with some having links to underworld dons Dawood Ibrahim and Chota Shakeel.
The authority, headed by former Supreme Court judge M.B. Shah, was requested by a bench of Justices Aftab Alam and C.K. Prasad to go into the 19 cases while giving it liberty to hand over the investigation in any of these cases after a “thorough” examination either to the special task force set up by the state or any outside probe agency.
The direction came on two PILs filed by journalist B.G. Verghese and Bollywood lyricist Javed Akhtar seeking unravelling of the “truth” behind each case given that most encounters in the state between 2002 and 2006 were proving “fake”.
As Gujarat government special counsel Ranjit Kumar raised questions on PILs pending since 2007, the bench said there was no need to question the “bona fide” of the petitioners, all prominent citizens. “Why in Gujarat, when (such) a matter comes, the state initially stoutly and vehemently denies it. When the matter is scratched even slightly, only then the facts come to light and the state government admits it as a fake encounter,” the bench pointed out.