Killed Sohrab to save Modi: Ex-DIG

Mumbai: A day after a CBI court acquitted all 22 accused in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case, former deputy inspector general (DIG) of Gujarat police, D.G. Vanjara, on Saturday claimed that his team had carried out Sohrabuddin and his aide Tulsiram Prajapati’s encounter to stop them from killing Prime Minister and then chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi. Vanjara was earlier discharged in the Sohrabuddin murder case by the trial court.

Vanjara said that Mr Modi would have been dead like Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. He also claimed that the police was made a scapegoat in the fight between the Gujarat government and the Centre.

Vanjara had tweeted, “Terrorists successfully assassinated political leaders like Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Beant Singh, Benazir Bhutto and Premdasa. Had the post-Godhra preemptive encounters not been carried out by the Gujarat police, @narendramodi would have met the same fate. We saved the saviour. #SohrabuddinCase”. His use of the phrase “preemptive encounter’ embarrassed the judiciary and outraged many.

On Friday, he again tweeted saying, “The high court judgment in the #soharabuddincase, 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.”

The CBI court on Friday concluded that the trio had been murdered. But it claimed to be helpless in the face of inadequate evidence produced by the CBI against the accused. Judge S.J. Sharma said in his judgment that the prosecution had failed to prove any conspiracy behind these murders.

Vanjara, who was arrested and spent two years in jail, wrote a threatening letter from prison, claiming that the encounters had been carried out at the behest of political masters. He held out a veiled thr-eat that he would expose the masters if they failed to stand by the police officers. Soon after the Modi government came to pow-er, the first to get acquitted was BJP president Amit Shah; the acquittal coming a month after the Judge hearing the case, B.H. Lo-ya, died under controversial circumstances in Nagpur.