Late one night in November 2005, a small group of plain-clothed police officers pulled over a bus in western India. They escorted a man named Sohrabuddin Sheikh off the vehicle, who was joined on the side of the road by his wife, Kausar. Sheikh and Kausar were put into separate police cars and driven 1,000km away, across state lines, into Gujarat. They would never see each other again.
Sheikh had not been charged with anything. On reaching Ahmedabad, Gujarat's most populous city, Sheikh and Kausar were not taken to a police station. They were detained in separate bungalows in a residential neighbourhood. Two days later, on 26 November, Sheikh was driven to a highway intersection in south Ahmedabad and shot dead. Police claimed Sheikh was a member of an Islamist terrorist group and had been shot while trying to escape. Four days after Sheikh's death, Kausar was killed. Policemen allegedly poisoned her, then carried her body to the Narmada River, where they burned it and dumped the remains in the water.
According to records later obtained by central government investigators, the officers allegedly involved made several phone calls around the time of each killing. On the other end of the line, each time, was a senior Gujarati politician who ran the state's home ministry, which put him in charge of the police. His name was Amit Shah.
This story is from the May 24, 2024 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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This story is from the May 24, 2024 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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