The Supreme Court has dismissed a plea seeking review of its decision upholding the clean chit given by subordinate courts to Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case.
The apex court rejected the plea of activist Harsh Mander challenging the order by which it had dismissed the appeal against the discharge of the BJP leader in the case by the Bombay high court upholding the trial court order.
“We have perused the review petition and the connected papers. We do not find any error in the order impugned, much less an apparent error on the face of the record so as to call for its review. The review petition is accordingly dismissed,” a bench of Justices S A Bobde and Ashok Bhushan said in its order of October 19.
The apex court had on August 1 upheld the clean chit given by the high court and the trial court to the BJP president in the encounter case and rejected the plea for its revival.
While rejecting the appeal, the bench had questioned the locus standi of Mander, a former bureaucrat and social activist, in pursuing the case in which the victim’s brother Rubabuddin Sheikh had preferred to withdraw the petition.
Mander had challenged the Bombay high court order which had upheld the discharge of the BJP president by the trial court.
Senior advocate Harish Salve, appearing for Shah, had cited various judgments of the apex court to support the contention that the former bureaucrat, as a third party, did not have the locus in the instant case.
In the appeal, Mander had sought quashing of December 30, 2014 order of a Mumbai sessions court giving a clean chit to Shah in the case.
The petitioner had questioned the findings of the sessions court which was endorsed by the high court while exonerating Shah in the Tulsiram Prajapati killing case, holding that there existed ‘no case’ against him and that he had been implicated for ‘political reasons’.
Mander had petitioned the high court against the sessions court order which was dismissed by the Bombay high court in March this year.
Sohrabuddin, a gangster, was allegedly abducted with his wife Kausar Bi by Gujarat police when they were on way from Hyderabad to Sangli in Maharashtra in 2005 and later killed.
Tulsiram, an aide of the gangster and an eyewitness to the encounter, was also killed allegedly by the police in 2006.
