User:Bluerasberry/Sohrabuddin Sheikh

Sohrabuddin Anwarhussain Sheikh (known as Sohrabuddin) was a habitual criminal offender and history-sheeter in Gujarat, India. The 2005 death of Sohrabuddin Sheikh became a major political controversy in India with a major court case ending in 2018.

2005 police encounter
On November 23, 2005, Sohrabuddin Sheikh was traveling on a public bus with his wife, Kauser Bi, from Hyderabad to Sangli, Maharashtra. At 01:30 am, the Gujarat police ATS stopped the bus and took them away. Kauser wanted to stay with her husband, but was taken to a Disha farmhouse outside Ahmedabad instead.

Three days later, Sheikh was killed in an encounter on a highway at Vishala Circle near Ahmedabad. The report filed in the Supreme Court by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) quotes a number of witnesses and builds up a narrative of the killing.

General crimes
Apart from being involved in the criminal extortion racket in Gujarat, Sheikh was also involved in arms smuggling in Madhya Pradesh, and also had murder cases registered against him in Gujarat and Rajasthan. Sheikh was also claimed by the police to be associated with the banned global terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Pakistani intelligence agency Inter-Services Intelligence.

Sheikh was alleged by the police to be extorting protection money from local marble factories in Gujarat and Rajasthan. He was also claimed to have links to fellow underworld criminals Sharifkhan Pathan, Abdul Latif, Rasool Parti and Brajesh Singh, who were all members and associates of India's largest organized crime network and underworld mafia operated by Dawood Ibrahim. During investigations before he was arrested, the Anti-Terror Squad (ATS) of the Gujarat police claimed to have found 40 AK-47 assault rifles from his village residence in Madhya Pradesh.

Assassination plans
Sohrabuddin was alleged to have planned to create communal chaos in the state by assassinating "an important political leader". Although the target of Sheikh's plans has never been officially revealed, the impression was given to political effect that it was to have been Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi. Sheikh's wife Kauser Bi also disappeared on the same day as his killing. A year later, on December 26, 2006, Sheikh's associate Tulsiram Prajapati, a witness to Sheikh's killing, was also killed in another police encounter shooting.

Allegations of involvement in Haren Pandya murder
The newspaper DNA, citing sources in the Gujarat State Police, reported in August 2011 that Sohrabuddin and Tulsiram may have been "used to kill Haren Pandya", the erstwhile BJP leader who was once close to Narendra Modi. The murder remains unsolved after 12 people arrested for it were released in what the high court called a "botched up and blinkered" investigation. According to the DNA report, Sohrabuddin was initially given the task but he back-pedalled and the murder was eventually executed by Tulsiram. The encounter killings of Sohrabuddin and Tulsiram were a result of unease among the conspirators:
 * However, the alleged conspirators at whose behest Pandya was killed began to lose confidence in Sohrabuddin and Tulsiram and, eventually, their equations began to worsen, the source said.

A similar charge has been made by ex-IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt, who discovered evidence for Sohrabuddin and Tulsiram's involvement and forwarded it to Amit Shah, who sounded "very disturbed over the telephone" and asked him "not to speak about it to anyone". Bhatt followed this up with a letter to Shah detailing the "involvement of Sohrabuddin and some policemen in the murder".

Personal life
Sohrabuddin had several brothers and was married.