Ahmedabad, April 29: The CBI on Wednesday arrested Abhay Chudasama, deputy commissioner of police ( DCP) of Ahmedabad’s crime branch, in connection with the fake encounter killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh.
Chudasama was posted as superintendent of police ( SP) in Valsad district in south Gujarat in 2005, when the encounter was staged. Chudasama had moved through the state police ranks before becoming an IPS officer.
According to the CBI, Chudasama was one of the conspirators behind the abduction and murder of Sohrabuddin and his wife Kausarbi on November 26, 2005. Chudasama also took part in the encounter and later influenced important witnesses to conceal facts and give false statements to the agency.
Three IPS officers — D. G. Vanzara and Rajkumar Pandiyan of Gujarat cadre and Dinesh Amin of Rajasthan cadre — have already been arrested in connection with this fake encounter, with 11 other police officials.
Chudasama is the first one to be arrested by the CBI since the central agency took up the case on January 12.
During Chudasama’s tenure as the Valsad SP, three questionable encounter killings took place in the district under the leadership of crime branch inspector K. G. Erda, who too has been arrested by the Special Investigation Team for his role during the Naroda Patiya massacre in the 2002 riots. Rahul Sharad Chaudhury, Dongdaia Himla Mahchar and Haji Ismail were killed between January 2004 and December 2005.
The fake encounter of Sohrabuddin and his wife had been a chronic source of embarrassment for Narendra Modi’s government. While Modi tried to extract some political mileage out of the issue during the 2007 Gujarat polls, his government later had to admit before the Supreme Court that it was a fake encounter.
—-Agencies