By IANS
New Delhi/Ahmedabad : Three more policemen of Gujarat's anti-terrorist squad (ATS) were arrested in Ahmedabad Monday as forensic experts finished conducting excavations at the farm of arrested police officer D.G. Vanzara looking for possible remains of Kausar Bi, the wife of encounter victim Sohrabuddin Sheikh.
All three officials – sub-inspectors Ajay Parmar and Sant Ram Sharma and inspector N.H. Dabhi – were arrested for their alleged roles in facilitating and providing logistics in the staged killing of Sheikh in November 2005.
Sharma had reportedly provided the motorcycle in which Sheikh was made to flee before being shot, Dabhi was the gunman who allegedly shot Sheikh while Parmar was part of the encounter team. All of them were presented in a city court and arrested by the Criminal Investigation Department.
"We will be questioning them closely and trying to reconstruct what exactly happened on that fateful day when Sheikh was killed and also how Kausar Bi was kept in a farmhouse and later burnt," said a highly placed police official.
In a related development to the case that has seen several twists and turns following the arrest of three Indian Police Service officers on April 24, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) released a video of Sheikh in both Bhopal and Gandhinagar claiming he was indeed a terrorist.
The grainy video footage showed Sheikh's body being carried by a group of people screaming anti-India slogans.
"The Narendra Modi government is doing very well on all fronts. If there is a fake encounter case, the government will certainly take action," said BJP leader, Ravi Shankar Prasad.
In Delhi, proceedings in both houses of parliament were disrupted after the Congress and other parties, including the Samajwadi Party, demanded Modi's resignation over the fake encounters and accused his government of shielding policemen.
Forensic experts will now examine samples collected from the site confined around an abandoned well behind Vanzara's massive bungalow in Illol where policemen allegedly burnt Kauser Bi.
An eight-member Gujarat CID (Crime) team was assisted by experts from the Directorate of Forensic Science, Gandhinagar, which carried on excavations right through Sunday to find some clinching evidence of Kauser Bi's remains.
"We have collected some samples. Let's see what comes out," a senior police official said.
The CID team, investigating the case under directions from the Supreme Court, is racing against time as it has just one day to carry out its interrogation of the three IPS officers, whose remand ends Tuesday.
The police had arrested former director of the Gujarat anti-terrorism squad, Vanjara, Superintendent of Police of the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), Rajkumar Pandian, and an officer from the Rajasthan ATS, Dinesh Kumar.
The three had claimed that Sheikh was a Lashkar-e-Toiba operative on a mission to kill Narendra Modi.
Sheikh's wife, Kauser Bi, was also with him at the time of the encounter and was killed by the policemen. Her body was later burnt and disposed off.
Sheikh was travelling with his wife from Hyderabad to Sangli on an inter-state bus in Maharashtra when the Gujarat ATS and the Rajasthan Special Task Force picked them along with a third man, Tulsiram Prajapati.
Prajapati, too, was killed by the police in the encounter.