After eluding the CBI for four days, former Gujarat minister and Narendra Modi’s aide Amit Shah was today arrested by the probe agency in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case and sent to jail shortly after he made a dramatic appearance at a BJP briefing.
Shah, 46, who resigned from the Modi government yesterday following a chargesheet being filed against him, turned up at the BJP office in Ahmedabad, where he denied all the charges against him.
He then drove to the Gandhinagar office of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and surrendered before the agency, which arrested him and produced him before Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate A Y Dave.
Surprisingly, CBI did not press for custody of Shah, who has been charged with murder, extortion, kidnapping and five other sections under the IPC for the killing of Sohrabuddin and his wife Kausar Bi, in 2005. He was remanded by the magistrate in judicial custody for 13 days till August 7 and taken to Sabarmati jail in Ahmedabad.
“I have full faith in the judiciary and I am sure the allegations against me will be cleared by the courts,” Shah said, after he appeared during a press conference called by state BJP president R C Faldu at the party headquarters in Ahmedabad, ending the suspense of his whereabouts since Thursday when he was first summoned by CBI.
Shah claimed he was innocent and that charges against him were “fabricated, politically motivated and were on the instruction of Congress government” and demanded that his entire questioning by CBI should be video-graphed.
Shah, who is elected from Sarkhej constituency and had been minister of state for home in the Modi government since 2002, also said that the Chief Minister should not be dragged into the issue.
“There is no need to drag Chief Minister Narendra Modi into this issue,” he said to a reporter’s query.
Later, he went to the CBI office in Gandhinagar. Waving to mediapersons after alighting from his car, he found officers of the probe agency waiting for him.
The BJP slammed Shah’s arrest, accusing the central government of misusing the CBI, an allegation dismissed by the Congress, which said the probe agency would not risk the wrath of the Supreme Court by levelling false charges.
