With the SC now monitoring investigations, Gujarat DGP P.C. Pande has been pushed to a corner. The DGP has ordered procedural steps which, on the face of it, are aimed at speeding up the probe, but may actually bog it down. Like his making it mandatory for additional DGP O.P. Mathur to oversee investigations on a day-to-day basis. In effect, Mathur's approval is now required for all searches, arrests, any custodial interrogation and even the future line of investigation.
Now, coming to the victim himself. Sohrabuddin, labelled a terrorist and an LeT operative, was actually an extortionist who operated in the marble/mineral-rich Udaipur-Beawar belt of Rajasthan. Apparently, he had made life difficult for the marble traders in the region. It is believed that some of them with political links in the Gujarat BJP decided that Sohrabuddin should be bumped off. This, many suspect, was the genesis of Vanzara's fake encounters. The terrorist tag on Sohrabuddin came because in 1994 Gujarat police claimed to have recovered 36 AK-47 rifles from a well in Sheikh's farm in Ujjain district of MP. Ten people were then arrested but all were let off later by the court for want of evidence.
Besides Sohrabuddin and his wife Kauser Bi, the third 'encounter victim' was Tulsi Prajapati, a small-time gangster and friend. In fact, it is believed that Tulsi was used by the police to track down Sohrabuddin. Another friend of Tulsi, Udaipur-based Sylvestor Daniel Christian, was picked up along with him on December 12, 2005, by the Gujarat ATS. He too is still missing.
Post Vanzara's arrest, more cases of 'encounters' are spilling out every day. Shamima Raza, mother of 19-year-old Ishrat Jahan who was shot dead along with three others on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in June '04, is on record saying her daughter was also a victim of a fake encounter. The police had gone to town saying the three were LeT operatives out to assassinate chief minister Modi. Ishrat was a first-year student of Khalsa college in Bombay. Remarkably, Vanzara was at hand in this episode too, as DCP Ahmedabad.
Then there's the case of Samirkhan Pathan, an Ahmedabad youth killed in the Usmanpura locality on October 22, '02. Next comes Sadik Jamal of Bhavnagar, bumped off near the Galaxy cinema in Ahmedabad on January 13, '03. His parents, Zeenabibi and Sarfraz Khan Pathan, are emphatic that their son was killed in a fake encounter. More recently, on March 17, '06, four presumed 'Kashmir terrorists' were shot dead near Vatwa in Ahmedabad. All these incidents are now under a cloud as they happened under Vanzara's watch. Ironically, in every instance he had claimed that Modi was the target.
