DIG spoke to Shah,lit Kausar pyre

After the killings,Shah directed two of his confidants to convince,coerce,threaten,influence all witnesses to conceal the truth from the CBI,alleges the chargesheet.

Shah,according to the CBI,told two Ahmedabad-based builders that Sohrabuddin had to be killed because he had foreclosed the alternative of keeping himself alive and there were political compulsions which an ordinary person like him would not understand.

The chargesheet suggests that when police picked up Sohrabuddin and Tulsi Prajapati from a bus that had left Hyderabad,they did not mean to kill Kausar Bi and just wanted her out of the way. But Kausar Bi,the chargesheet says,told the policemen mere shohar ke bina nahi jaungi (I will not leave without my husband) when one of them asked her to board the bus again. The policemen argued among themselves for a while and finally took her along.

Sohrabuddin and Prajapati were taken in a Qualis,Kausar Bi in a Tata Sumo following it. According to the chargesheet,they all had lunch at a Valsad hotel where Prajapati was shifted to another vehicle brought by the STF policemen from Rajasthan. Sohrabuddin and Kausar Bi were taken to Disha farm near the Sarkhej-Gandhinagar highway and kept there for three days before being shifted to Arham farmhouse.

While Kausar Bi was kept in the farmhouse,Gujarat ATS and Rajasthan STF policemen took Sohrabuddin in an official car to a spot near Narol and Vishala Circle. He was made to get out of the car,says the chargesheet,and shot dead in a cold-blooded manner.

Kausar Bi was killed thereafter. Her body,wrapped in a black blanket,was taken to Ilol village in a convoy comprising a tempo,jeep and car. The policemen,the chargesheet says,fetched straw and firewood from the village outskirts and stacked it in the tempo. They unloaded it on the roadside and prepared a pyre.

According to the chargesheet,some of the policemen had no idea whose body was being burnt. One of them,V A Rathod,realised it was a woman when the blanket unrolled while the body was being shifted. A fellow policeman told him it was Kausar Bi.

The chargesheet alleges that a policeman brought a plastic can of diesel from the jeep,poured the diesel on the body and Vanzara himself set it on fire. Policemen later poured water on the ash and bones. Vanzara,according to the chargesheet,told two policemen to collect all remains in a gunny bag which was later thrown into the Narmada river.

The chargesheet says that DCP Abhay Chudasama,at the behest of Shah,tried to offer the family of Sohrabuddin Rs 50 lakh to withdraw the petition they had filed in the Supreme Court for a probe. The family refused to take the money though Chudasama,says the chargesheet,threatened that Shah would get them eliminated in Madhya Pradesh where too the BJP was in power. Shah also threatened Zahid Kadri who had filed a petition against the police in a magistrates court and a writ petition in the High Court,alleges the chargesheet.

The chargesheet indicates that Sohrabuddin was used as a pawn in an extortion racket run by the police officers and Shah. Sohrabuddin was made to strike terror among Ahmedabads business community through a stage-managed shootout in a builders office,then eliminated to strike bigger fear among businessmen and make extortion simpler,alleges the chargesheet. The Rajasthan policemen,it says,were party to the killing because Sohrabuddin had been terrorising the marble lobby in that state.