NEW DELHI: Every time there is a high profile investigation involving CBI, the agency’s handling of the case leaves a lot to be desired, reminding the observation of the learned Supreme Court judges of ‘a parrot in the cage‘, the latest being the lack of evidence in the Amit Shah case.
A Mumbai court recently found no evidence that merits trial of the BJP president on murder charges in the alleged fake encounter case of gangster Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife. However, media reports claim a major lapse on the part of CBI which reportedly argued only for 45 minutes to make its case.
However, the CBI director Anil Sinha feigned ignorance, asking mediapersons “is it?”, when he was asked by reporters about the arguments. Defence lawyers, on the other hand, had spent two days making their case before the judge to exempt Shah from three murder charges.
“How do you know the written submissions weren’t strong enough? It was very lengthy so please go through that,” a CBI official, who did not want to be named, told NDTV, says a report on NDTV website.
The judge on Wednesday found there was no evidence that when Shah was the Home Minister of Gujarat, he had ordered the state police to carry out the extrajudicial killings of a gangster Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife and a friend about ten years ago.
CBI maintains that the powerful lobby of marble traders from Rajasthan had approached Shah for help after regular extortion of money by Sheikh, and Shah had asked Gujarat police to eliminate the gangster.
The gangster was taken away from a bus with his wife forcefully by police and was killed in a staged encounter in 2005. His wife’s cremated body was later found in a Gujarat village, CBI had said in a chargesheet following which Shah spent three months in jail before getting bail from the Supreme Court in 2010.
It is not yet clear if the CBI will appeal against the verdict as Sinha refused to make any comment until he went through the judgement.
