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Tulsiram Prajapati was an Indian criminal who was killed while in custody at 5 am on 28 December 2006. The case is widely believed to have been an encounter killing by the Gujarat Police. DIG D.G. Vanzara has been in jail for seven years, on charges of having organised this encounter, among others.
Contents
- Amit Shah arrest in the case
- Possible involvement in Haren Pandya assassination
- CBI Reconstruct Tulsi Prajapati encounter case
- References
On 8 April 2011, the Supreme Court of India directed the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to take up the investigation.
Amit Shah arrest in the case
The case came into prominence in 2012, when the CBI, in its chargesheet, listed Gujarat home minister and leading BJP politician Amit Shah as the "kingpin and prime accused" in the case. Amit Shah was arrested in October 2012. Earlier, an unprecedented total of 32 police officers, including six IPS officers including Vanzara, had been arrested for the series of "encounter deaths".
According to the CBI, Prajapati was a witness to the encounter death of Sohrabuddin Shaikh in 2005, and this was why he had to be eliminated.
The encounter killing took place in Banaskantha district. Just 13 days earlier, Vanzara, known to be close to Amit Shah and Modi, was surprisingly transferred there as DIG Border range. Mr Shah claimed that the transfer was an administrative move, not connected to the encounter.
Possible involvement in Haren Pandya assassination
In September 2013, after six years in prison, Vanzara who called Modi "my God", became disgruntled, and apparently claimed a connection between the Tulsiram Prajapati and the unsolved murder of ex-BJP minister Haren Pandya, who was at one time a minister under Narendra Modi. Pandya was shot dead while out on a morning walk in March 2003, a year after his fallout with Modi. In 2003, it was Vanzara who had originally investigated the Pandya murder. Similar claims have also been made by the DNA newspaper, which has suggested that Sheikh was eliminated because of his links to the political murder of Pandya.
CBI Reconstruct Tulsi Prajapati encounter case
The CBI and a team of forensic science experts reconstructed the alleged fake encounter of Tulsi Prajapati by Gujarat police in 2006 at Chhapri village in the district on Friday. The team headed by Rajendra Singh of the Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL),and T D Dogra of Forensic Medicine Department at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS),began the reconstruction early morning.The forensic experts and CBI were assisted by state CID officials. CID was investigating the case before Supreme Court transferred it to the central agency. The experts obtained crucial data such as the distance between the police vehicle and the car in which Prajapati was travelling,location of Prajapati’s body after the encounter as per the CID’s FIR,how police officers fired at Prajapati and the distance from which they fired.