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A plea has been filed before the Supreme Court challenging the Bombay High Court order acquitting 22 accused, including 21 policemen (from Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Andhra Pradesh), in the 2005 encounter case of Sohrabuddin Shaikh, his wife Kausar Bi, and his aide Tulsiram Prajapati.

The petition has been filed by Nayabuddin Shaikh, younger brother of the deceased Sohrabuddin Shaikh, challenging the High Court's judgment wherein a bench of Chief Justice Shree Chandrashekhar and Justice Gautam Ashwin Ankhad dismissed the appeals filed against the acquittal of all the accused persons.

As per the prosecution, Sohrabuddin Shaikh, his wife Kausar Bi, and his aide Tulsiram Prajapati were abducted by a police team while travelling in a bus from Hyderabad to Maharashtra in 2005. Shaikh who was allegedly killed in an encounter near Ahmedabad and his wife three days later. His aide, Prajapati was killed in another encounter on Gujarat-Rajasthan border in 2006.

The Supreme Court directed the investigation to be transferred from Gujarat Crime Investigation Department (CID) to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) while also directing the trial to be shifted from Gujarat to Mumbai. The case of Prajapati's encounter killing was also clubbed with that of Shaikh.

Out of 210 witnesses, 92 turned hostile. In 2018, the Special CBI Court in Mumbai acquitted all the accused persons, holding that the prosecution had failed to establish a cogent case of any conspiracy to kill Shaikh and others.

In 2019, an appeal was filed before the Bombay High Court challenging the acquittal orders, which was recently decided in Rubabuddin Shaikh v Central Bureau of Investigation, holding that there was no ground to interfere with the trial court's judgment, observing that the prosecution's case rested on circumstantial evidence with “several broken links in the chain of circumstances.” The High Court found that the prosecution had failed to establish that Shaikh and Kausar Bi were abducted by the police, and had failed to establish any motive for staging a fake encounter. It further held that the large number of hostile witnesses did not, ipso facto, permit an inference that the trial had not been conducted properly. It also recorded that there was no evidence to establish any politician-police nexus behind the alleged encounters.

Challenging the Bombay High Court's acquittal, a petition has been filed before the Supreme Court on August 13, 2026. The petitioner is represented by Advocate Achint Kumar.

Case: Nayabuddin Shaikh v Central Bureau of Investigation

Diary Number: 49466/2026

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