Vadodara custodial death: CID to visit Telangana with pictures of unclaimed body for identification

Nearly 11 months since he went missing and four months after Vadodara police registered an FIR against six of its officials for allegedly killing him in custody, a team of CID (crime) is expected to visit the victim's son in Telangana with pictures of unclaimed bodies lying in the mortuary for possible identification.

This is one of the steps being taken to trace the dead body of Telangana resident Babu Nasir Shaikh, 65, who died in December 2019 at Fatehgunj police station in Vadodara in illegal police custody.

The CID, entrusted to trace the body by Gujarat High Court where a habeas corpus petition is being heard, has already drained water from the nine-km stretch of Narmada canal near Vadodara city twice to look for remains of Shaikh's body but the exercise has remained unsuccessful.

On Friday, the CID officials informed the High Court that it plans to send a team with mugshots of unclaimed bodies lying in the mortuary to Shaikh's son Salim for identification. Besides, the team will also collect DNA sample of his son to match with the bodies kept at the mortuary.

The CID team is also probing into the statement recorded by one of the police witnesses who has said that Shaikh was allegedly burnt by the accused policemen in order to get rid of the evidence. The witness has said that the accused police inspector D B Gohil is closely associated with a petrol pump owner who might have helped in procuring petrol for burning the body. The CID has obtained the CCTV footage and sent it to the forensic laboratory to retrieve all data.

According to the FIR, Shaikh was picked up by a surveillance team of Fatehgunj police on December 10, 2019, and was brought to the station as a suspect in a theft case. The FIR alleges that the accused police inspector D B Gohil interrogated and tortured Shaikh. It claims, "Shaikh, who was tied to a chair in a way that he couldn't move, was beaten up, tortured by squeezing a pen between his fingers and pressed hard to hurt him, he was bleeding." The FIR says that Shaikh kept crying in pain telling the interrogators that he had done nothing wrong.

The FIR is based on three police witnesses who were posted at the same police station, besides a private witness who was called by the accused to lodge an FIR related to an attempt of theft at his house and he saw Shaikh lying lifeless at the chair. The CCTV footage of the police station also revealed Shaikh being brought to the station but the record of Shaikh's exit was not found in the record. Police suspect that the CCTV camera might have been switched off by accused policemen. All six accused policemen were arrested and are in judicial custody.