Abhay Chudasama. Picture by Mayur Bhatt

Ahmedabad, April 28: The law has finally caught up with IPS officer Abhay Chudasama, four-and-a-half years after he allegedly planted a gun to prove that petty criminal Sohrabuddin Sheikh was a terrorist out on a mission to kill the chief minister and therefore had to be shot down.

The 45-year-old officer was today arrested by the CBI, which had, in January, been instructed by the Supreme Court to take over the probe into the alleged fake encounter death of Sohrabuddin and his wife Kausarbi in 2005.

Chudasama, the fourth IPS officer to be arrested in the case, is currently posted in Ahmedabad as deputy commissioner of police (crime branch).

CBI officials said Chudasama had been accused of being an “active participant” who conspired to “execute the abduction and murder of Sohrabuddin Sheikh and the disappearance of his wife Kausarbi”.

The investigation, previously conducted by IPS officer Geeta Johri, has already claimed three top policemen: D.G. Vanzara, the suspended deputy inspector-general who then headed the Gujarat anti-terrorism squad, Rajkumar Pandian, the then deputy commissioner in the ATS, and Rajasthan’s Dinesh Kumar M.N.

All three IPS officers are lodged in Sabarmati jail pending trial.

Chudasama was then posted as the superintendent of police in Valsad, a south Gujarat district, but his role had come under the scanner following eyewitness accounts.

Sources said Chudasama was known to be close to Vanzara. Although he was posted in south Gujarat, Chudasama had been working as Vanzara’s team member and was believed to be monitoring the movements of Sohrabuddin and tipping off the senior officer.

Sources said Chudasama, a physics graduate who is known to be tech-savvy, had left his mobile phone at Valsad, 325km from Ahmedabad on whose outskirts Sohrabuddin was killed, so that his movements could not be tracked on that fateful day.

While Sohrabuddin was killed on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, his wife was initially kept in a farmhouse near Gandhinagar. Subsequently she was also killed and her body disposed of in a dry well at Illol, the native village of Vanzara, around 90km from Ahmedabad.

The sources alleged that Chudasama had “tried to influence important witnesses to conceal facts and issue false statements”.