New Delhi, Sept. 30: The Supreme Court today stayed trial proceedings against three former Gujarat police officers accused in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case.

At the request of amicus curiae (officer assisting the court) Gopal Subramanium, a bench of Justices Tarun Chatterjee and Aftab Alam said the trial in an Ahmedabad sessions court could not resume till the apex court decided whether the case needed to be probed by an independent agency.

The judges also directed the registrar of the apex court to seal the records pertaining to the case so that they could not be tampered with.

The trial court had begun hearing the case against former DIG D.G. Vanzara and two other IPS officers — N.K. Amin and M.N. Dinesh — on September 26. The prosecution and the defence had both presented their preliminary arguments but the court was yet to frame charges.

Eleven other officers have been accused of involvement in the killing of Sohrabuddin, an alleged gangster, in 2005 and the disappearance of his wife Kausar Bi.

All the accused officers are in jail.

Sohrabuddin’s brother Rubabuddin had filed a petition in the Supreme Court seeking an independent probe into the alleged encounter.

The court today directed Madhya Pradesh police to provide protection to Rubabuddin’s family.

The Gujarat government has admitted that its police gunned down Sohrabuddin, but denied they had a hand in Kausar’s disappearance.

Subramanium tore into the report prepared by senior Gujarat IPS officer Geeta Johri, who was in charge of the case. “This report is a high-scale cover-up…. It is not just sheer incompetence,” the amicus curiae said. “Why protect police officers if they are on the wrong side of the law?”

He accused Johri of “pulling cotton wool over the eyes of the court”, and asked the judges to “go into the motivation of doing so”. “The investigation by Geeta Johri is shoddy, incompetent and designed to tamper with the truth,” Subramanium added.

Rubabuddin had asked for a CBI probe in 2007, but the Supreme Court had kept his plea in abeyance and asked Johri to look into the case.