Thaindian News

New Delhi, June 7 (IANS) The Supreme Court Thursday gave the Central Bureau of Investigation a month’s extension till June 30 to complete its probe into the killing of Tulsiram Prajapati in an alleged staged shoot-out case and file a charge sheet.

A bench of Justice K.S. Radhakrishnan and Justice J.S. Khehar granted the CBI’s request, after it was told that the investigating agency needed more time as there was a change of investigating officer and the new officer had to go through the records before the charge sheet was finalised.

It is the fourth extension granted to the agency since the apex court handed over the probe to it in April 2011. The latest extension ended May 28.

The CBI, in its charge sheet in the killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife Kausarbi, claimed that Prajapati was eliminated in a joint operation by the Gujarat and Rajasthan Police forces as he was the witness to the apprehending of Sheikh and his wife by Gujarat Police in 2005.

The agency claimed that it was Prajapati who had travelled with Sheikh and Kausarbi from Hyderabad to Sangli in Maharashtra by a state roadways bus in November 2005. Gujarat Police had earlier held that the third person was not Prajapati but a man called Kalimuddin.

The CBI contended that the staged killings of Sheikh and later of Prajapati were linked and had to be seen together.

An apex court bench of Justice P. Sathasivam and Justice B.S.Chauhan had ordered the CBI to probe the killing of Prajapati April 8, 2011, on a plea by Prajapati’s mother Narmada Bai.

The Gujarat government had opposed the handing over the investigation to the CBI as it contended that the Congress-led central government was trying to implicate the state’s former minister of state for home Amit Shah.