Best Bakery case: Zaheera Sheikh in judicial custody

Prime witness in the Best Bakery case Zahira Sheikh, who has gone from being the complainant to the convict & sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for perjury, surrendered before the special fast track court in Mazagaon on 10 February, 2006, putting to rest all speculations. Sessions Judge Abhay Tipsay directed Mumbai Police to take Zaheera into its custody and produce her on March 13 to decide her application and go through the Supreme Court order sentencing her to jail.

The court also directed police to make special arrangements for her security as she apprehended threat to her life in prisons in Maharashtra and Gujarat. Zaheera pleaded that she may be kept in the custody of this court and did not want to go to any prison in Gujarat as she feared threat to her life.

Best Bakery was set afire on March 1, 2002, by a violent crowd at Hanuman Tekdi at Vadodara, killing 14 persons who had taken refuge in the premises. The communal riots in Gujarat following the Sabarmati Express train carnage instigated this flare up. Zaheera, who along with her family survived the bakery fire, had moved the apex court alleging that all the 21 accused in the case had been acquitted by the Gujarat trial court as she had turned hostile because of threats issued to her.
She was last seen on March 3 in Bhayander at the funeral of her brother Nafitullah, who had also been charged with perjury along with her other brother Nasibullah, mother Saherunissa and sister Sahera.

Zaheera’s surrender has ended the two days suspense about her whereabouts after she went into hiding from her relative's residence at suburban Bhayander in nearby Thane district following the apex court order. Soon after she surrendered before the court, Zaheera took the help of the prosecutor Manjula Rao to file the application. The nodal officer on behalf of Mumbai police DCP Mohan Rathod was present in the court.

With pressure mounting, the top brass in the police and the government were already nervous after the SC verdict and were trying to shrug off the fact that they knew of her whereabouts. Vadodara police commissioner Deepak Swaroop, who had sent notices to the police and intelligence officials in Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra to locate Zahira, told the press , "She was found only because of the pressure by our crime branch camping in Navi Mumbai and Thane."