New Delhi, Feb. 24: The Supreme Court today rapped the Gujarat government for unilaterally changing the head of a panel that is probing 15 alleged fake encounter deaths in Gujarat between 2003 and 2006.

“On Monday evening, you knew that the case would come up for hearing on Friday; yet you issue a notification (announcing the change) on Thursday. You could have taken us into confidence. You can’t present us with a fait accompli,” Justice Aftab Alam observed.

It was on the top court’s orders that Gujarat had last year set up the panel, headed by former apex court judge M.B. Shah, to oversee a state-appointed special task force’s probe into fake encounter deaths.

The special task force (STF) was set up on August 2 and the Shah panel five days later. On January 25 this year, the apex court had asked the Shah panel to constitute teams from the STF to investigate the 15 cases and get back to the court within three months.

But yesterday, the Gujarat government notified that Shah had been replaced with former Bombay High Court chief justice, K.R. Vyas, as head of the monitoring panel. It justified the move today, arguing that Shah had been reluctant to continue for several reasons, including health problems.

The Supreme Court bench of Justices Alam and Ranjana Desai did not agree.

“We had reposed our faith in a particular individual (Justice Shah),” Justice Alam observed, adding that before making any change, the state should have consulted the court.

Shah is known in judicial circles for his pro-poor and pro-worker leanings.

The counsel for lyricist Javed Akhtar and journalist B.G. Varghese, who had sought the probe into the killings, too rejected Gujarat’s move.

Lawyers Prashant Bhushan and Nitya Ramakrishnan urged the court to constitute a new probe team. Alternatively, Bhushan said, former apex court judge Sudershan Reddy or former Delhi High Court chief justice A.P. Shah could be asked to head the probe.

Bhushan alleged that some of the charges had been levelled directly at the chief minister and that the chief minister’s office was directly involved in a cover-up. That was why, he said, the litigants had sought a special investigation team and not just any team formed by the state government.

The court said it would take a call at the next hearing on Monday.

Akhtar has alleged in his petition that the police had killed one Sameer Khan in cold blood in a fake encounter. Verghese’s counsel, Ramakrishnan, claimed that several migrant labourers too had been killed in fake encounters in Gujarat after the 2002 riots.

Among the alleged fake encounters in Gujarat that are already under investigation are the killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife Kauser Bi, and the murder of a teenaged college student, Ishrat Jahan. Several IPS officers have been arrested and face murder charges in these cases.