Nayabuddin Sheikh, the brother of Sohrabuddin Sheikh, has moved the Supreme Court against the Bombay High Court’s decision to uphold the acquittal of 22 accused, including 21 police officers, in the 2005 case involving the alleged staged “encounter” killings of his brother and his aide Tulsiram Prajapati, and the alleged murder of his sister-in-law Kausar Bi in Gujarat, Live Law reported.The plea was filed on August 13 and challenges the High Court’s May 7 judgement dismissing the appeals against the acquittals.Sohrabuddin Sheikh, who was a wanted criminal, was killed by the Gujarat Police in November 2005 in an “encounter”, which is alleged to have been staged. He and his wife were travelling by bus from Hyderabad to Sangli in Maharashtra when they were stopped by the Gujarat and Rajasthan police, allegedly abducted and shot dead near Gandhinagar.A sub-inspector also allegedly raped Kauser Bi before murdering her. Prajapati was the sole witness to the murders. He was in police custody after the incident but was shot dead in another “encounter” in December 2006, when the police claimed he was trying to escape.In December 2018, a special Central Bureau of Investigation court acquitted all persons accused in the matter. In its judgement the court had held that the prosecution had failed to prove a conspiracy beyond reasonable doubt.Bharatiya Janata Party leader Amit Shah, who is now the Union home minister, was among the persons acquitted earlier in the case. Out of 210 witnesses examined during the trial, 92 were declared hostile.In April 2019, Nayabuddin Sheikh and another brother of Sohrabuddin Sheikh, Rubabuddin Sheikh, challenged the acquittal before the High Court, alleging that the trial was flawed and that several witness statements had not been recorded accurately.While upholding the acquittals, the High Court said the prosecution’s case was based on circumstantial evidence with “several broken links in the chain of circumstances”, Live Law reported.It also found that the prosecution had failed to show that Sohrabuddin Sheikh and Kausar Bi were abducted by the police or establish a motive for staging an allegedly fake “encounter”.The court said that the large number of hostile witnesses did not by itself show that the trial had not been properly conducted. It also said that it found no evidence of a politician-police nexus behind the alleged encounters.Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.