Mumbai: The Bombay high court on Thursday (May 7) upheld the acquittal of the 22 accused, including 21 police personnel from Gujarat and Rajasthan and the owner of a farmhouse where Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife, Kauser Bi, were detained before they were killed.A division bench, comprising Chief Justice Shree Chandrashekhar and justice Gautam Ankhad, dismissed the appeals filed by Sohrabuddin’s brothers, Rubabuddin and Nayabuddin Sheikh, against the December 2018 verdict of a special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court acquitting all the accused in the case. A detailed copy of the judgement is yet to be made public.The caseThe case dates back to November 22, 2005, when Sohrabuddin, Kauser Bi, and Tulsiram Prajapati were intercepted by the Gujarat Anti-Terrorism Squad while travelling by bus from Hyderabad to Sangli, Maharashtra. The trio was taken into custody near Zahirabad in Telangana, following which Sohrabuddin and his wife were allegedly taken to a farmhouse in Valsad, Gujarat.Sohrabuddin was killed in an alleged fake encounter on a highway near Ahmedabad on November 26. Police maintained that he had opened fire on officers and was killed in self-defence. According to reports, Kauser Bi was raped by a sub-inspector and killed three days later.An investigation was initiated after Sohrabuddin’s brother wrote to the CJI seeking inquiry, claiming that his brother had been killed extrajudicially and his wife murdered to eliminate evidence.On December 28, 2006, Prajapati, who had been the sole surviving witness to the abductions and encounter, was killed in another ‘encounter’ near the Gujarat-Rajasthan border while being escorted back to Udaipur jail. A Gujarat Criminal Investigation Department (CID) investigation in 2007 concluded that both encounters has been fake and Kauser Bi had been murdered and her body disposed of in Illol village, Gujarat.Implicating the powerfulThe case was transferred to the CBI in 2010 on Supreme Court’s directions and the trial was shifted to a special court in Mumbai in 2012. By that time, 38 people had been booked under the case, including senior IPS officers, former Rajasthan home minister Gulab Chand Kataria and Amit Shah, then home minister of Gujarat.The CBI chargesheet accused Shah of running a criminal extortion racket that Sohrabuddin had worked for in Rajasthan. Call data records cited by the CBI showed that Shah made several calls to the accused officers, including deputy inspector general D.G. Vanzara and officer Dinesh M.N., around the time of Prajapati’s encounter, the frequency of which increased whenever there were developments in the case.Between 2014 and 2017, 16 of the 38 accused were discharged from the case, with Shah’s discharge coming less than a month after the death of the presiding judge B.H. Loya under suspicious circumstances. The remaining 22, mostly low-ranking officers and the farmhouse owner, faced trial and were acquitted in 2018 after 92 of the 210 prosecution witnesses turned hostile.Also read: Sohrabuddin Fake Encounter Case: A Timeline of Events2018 verdictThe special CBI court, while acquitting the accused, held that the prosecution had failed to establish a cogent case suggesting that there had been any conspiracy to kill and that there was no substantial evidence to prove “murder” charges in the deaths of Sohrabuddin and Prajapati.It added that the agency had failed to obtain the sanction of the requisite authority under section 197 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) before filing the chargesheet, entitling the accused to acquittal. The presiding judge observed that the CBI appeared to have operated with a “premeditated theory and script” to implicate political leaders, rather than pursuing the truth.Sohrabuddin’s brothers challenged this verdict in April 2019, arguing that the trial was flawed and that testimonies of non-hostile witnesses had been wrongly disregarded. They also raised questions about the validity of witness statements. The high court admitted the appeal, however, the matter remained largely unheard until 2025 when the CBI told the court that it had accepted the 2018 acquittal and would not challenge it.Also read: In Sohrabuddin Sheikh ‘Encounter’ Case, CBI Tells Bombay HC it Won’t Appeal Against AcquittalTwo decades after Sohrabuddin was killed by the Gujarat police, the Bombay high court dismissed his brothers’ appeal against the special court’s verdict, leaving the family with little to no legal recourse.