Mumbai: In a scathing attack on Modi regime, earlier in Gujara and now in New Delhi, Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Saturday listed Sohrabuddin Sheik, Haren Pandya, Justice Loya and others and said no one killed them, they just died.
In a Twitter message posted on his official handler Saturday, Rahul Gandhi wrote: "NO ONE KILLED... Haren Pandya. Tulsiram Prajapati. Justice Loya. Prakash Thombre. Shrikant Khandalkar. Kauser Bi. Sohrabuddin Shiekh. THEY JUST DIED."
Haren Pandya was Home Minister of Gujarat when he was murdered in 2003. Justice Loya was presiding over the Sohrabuddin alleged fake encounter case when he mysteriously died in Nagpur. Justice Loya was in the city to attend wedding ceremony of a colleague's daughter.
Prakash Thombre was a retired district judge. A close confidant of Justice Loya, Thombre mysteriously died during a train journey in May, 2016. There have been persistent demands to probe all these deaths.
The comments by Rahul Gandhi were posted on the social media site a day after Special CBI Court in Mumbai acquitted all 22 accused in the alleged encounter killings of Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his aide Tulsiram Parajapati, and the alleged murder of Sheikh's wife Kausar Bi.
Meanwhile, former top cop DG Vanzara, virtually ruled out any real threat to Narendra Modi, then Chief Minister of Gujarat, and said the state police had killed Sohrabuddin Sheikh and others in "preemptive encounters" carried out after Godhra riots.
"Terrorists successfully assassinated Political Leaders like Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Beant Singh, Benazir Bhutto and Premdasa. Had Post-Godhara Preemptive Encounters not carried out by Gujarat Police, Narendra Modi would have met the same fate. We saved the Saviour", Vanzara wrote on Twitter soon after the CBI Court's verdict Friday.
"Bombay Court Judgement in #SohrabuddinCase, acquitting all 22 Police Officers has vindicated my stand that our encounters were genuine: We were wrongly framed for performing our duties. We became victims of political cross firing between the then occupants of Delhi and Gandhinagar", he wrote in another tweet posted on the same day.
Special Judge S J Sharma said the prosecution had not been able to satisfactorily prove that the accused were guilty of conspiracy, murder and other charges. He said that while the main foundation of the prosecution were key eyewitnesses, they turned hostile.
"I am helpless," the judge said, referring to the hostile witnesses and what he called insufficient evidence.
Among the accused were top police officers of Gujarat, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh. The alleged encounter killings took place in 2005 when Prime Minister Modi was chief minister of Gujarat. BJP chief Amit Shah was also one of the accused in the case. He however was discharged along with 16 others in December 2014.
Vanzara himself was an accused in the case and had spent more than two years in jail. He had earlier written a threatening letter from prison, claiming that the encounters had been carried out at the behest of political masters. He had held out the veiled threat of exposing the masters if they failed to stand by the police officers.
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