Ahmedabad:
Ahmed, the owner of a small travel agency in Hyderabad was at his office when a team of policemen arrived to see him with a photograph. They wanted to know if he recognized the man in the picture.
Ahmed did. A few months earlier, the man had bought two bus tickets to Gujarat. He had introduced himself as Salman; he was with a woman in a burqa.
Ahmed had no idea that the passenger had gone missing in the dead of the night, along with his wife, and a man they met on the bus headed to Sangli in Gujarat. "I identified the photograph that the Gujarat police showed me... the lady I did not see that day because she had a veil," Ahmed recalls.
The man Ahmed had known as Salman was Sohrabuddin Sheikh, whose bloody death would haunt the Gujarat government and human rights activists in separate but equal ways. In November 2005, he was killed by the Gujarat police who described him as a terrorist determinrf to assassinate Chief Minister Narendra Modi.(
Read: Who was Sohrabuddin Sheikh?)
Now, five years later, Amit Shah, Modi's main man, as he's described locally, has been arrested for Sohrabuddin's murder, creating a gigantic new political faultline that may originate in Ahmedabad but extends all the way to Delhi. The Opposition BJP has accused the CBI of having no case against Shah; it is being used, the party says, by the Congress to undermine Modi. The accusations have been shrill and the Prime Minister responded with uncharacteristic force on Monday, saying the CBI is not "The Congress Bureau of Investigation" and that the BJP "knows jolly well" that it was the Supreme Court that directed the CBI to take on the case and unravel what led to Sohrabuddin's murder.
In his 30s, Sohrabuddin blended in easily with the 40 other passengers on the bus he boarded out of Andhra Pradesh with his wife. This was a journey he was used to making. The CBI believes that he was an extortionist who had operated for years in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and to a lesser extent, in Ahmedabad. His targets were usually marble manufacturers, and two among them, who he had attempted to blackmail in 2004, had powerful political connections. Sohrabuddin, CBI sources say, had messed with the wrong guys.
His bus stopped at 1 am near the Tadola village in Bidar, 20 kilometres short of the Andhra-Karnataka border. The driver, Misbouddin, says that four men who were not in uniform introduced themselves as policemen. Each had a gun. They walked straight upto Seats 29 and 30. They left with three of Misbouddin's passengers in a car with an Andhra license plate.
As the bus continued its journey, those three passengers were taken by the Gujarat police to a farmhouse on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. Days later, Sohrabuddin was shot dead. His wife was never seen again. The third passenger with them - Tulsiram Prajapati - was killed a year later, once again, by policemen from Gujarat. Prajapati had written several letters to his family from jail warning that he was receiving death threats from policemen in Rajasthan and Gujarat He died a fortnight before the police was meant to record his testimony in the Sohrabuddin case. His death has been acknowledged by the Gujarat police as another fake encounter.
He was brought to Gujarat for hearing in a case. While on his way back, Prajapati tried to escape from custody by throwing chili powder in the eyes of the accompanying policemen, but was killed.