(From left) Pandian, Vanzara and Dinesh come out of the Ahmedabad court on Wednesday. (PTI)

Ahmedabad, April 25: Gujarat home minister Amit Shah is in trouble with both the Opposition and his own party’s government in neighbouring Rajasthan after the arrest of three senior IPS officers.

D.G. Vanzara and colleagues Rajkumar Pandian and M.N. Dinesh, who were arrested by the CID yesterday in a fake encounter case, were today remanded in police custody for seven days.

The arrests brought Rajasthan home minister Gulabchandra Kataria, police chief V.S. Gill and other top officials running to Gandhinagar this morning because one of the officers — Dinesh — belongs to the state cadre.

Kataria defended him as an “upright” officer with “an excellent track record” and questioned his arrest. “It is unfortunate that Gujarat police arrested our officer who had gone to Gandhinagar to record his statement. We were not even informed,” said the minister who met Shah and Gujarat police chief P.C. Pande.

The three officers were arrested by CID (crime) yesterday after being called for “questioning” in the presence of Pande. They are accused of murdering a suspected criminal from Madhya Pradesh, Sohrabuddin Sheikh, on November 26, 2005, on the outskirts of Ahmedabad and claiming that he was a Lashkar-e-Toiba militant on a mission to kill chief minister Narendra Modi.

Vanzara, seen as Modi’s blue-eyed boy who is now deputy inspector-general, and Pandian, superintendent in the Intelligence Bureau, were the seniormost officers in the Gujarat Anti-Terrorist Squad at the time.

If Rajasthan’s BJP government is upset with Shah for the arrest of its officer, the Gujarat Congress also has found ammunition against him in the arrests.

The Congress said the alleged fake encounter could not have been possible without directives from the top and sought a CBI inquiry. The CID, which arrested the three officers, cannot take action against their political boss if he is found guilty, party spokesman Shaktisinh Gohil said.

The CID probe was started after Sohrabuddin’s brother went to the Supreme Court in 2006 saying the encounter was fake.

Inspector-general CID (crime) Geeta Johri was given charge of the probe and had filed three interim reports in court nailing the three officers before she was replaced by another officer. The Congress claimed she was shunted out by Shah after she refused to tamper with witnesses’ statements. “We are questioning the intention of the state home minister’s decision. Why did he scuttle the inquiry?” Gohil asked.

It was more than a coincidence that Banaskantha district police killed Tulsiram Prajapati soon after Sohrabuddin’s brother Rubabuddin filed the petition, the Congress said. Prajapati is believed to have been the only other person in the luxury bus from Hyderabad to Sangli with Sohrabuddin and his wife Kausar Bano on the day of the encounter. Kausar is missing.

Prajapati’s killing was also described as an encounter with a terrorist.

Shah has gone on record saying there is no doubt Sohrabuddin was a terrorist. “Only the nature of the encounter is dubious,” he said.

The prosecution had sought 14 days’ custody of the officers, who looked calm as they appeared in the packed court of chief metropolitan magistrate K.J. Upadhyay, saying they needed time to trace Kausar and piece the sequence of events. However, custody was granted till May 1.