The dictation of the judgement, which remained inconclusive, would continue tomorrow.

The court today also dismissed the contention of Judge Aguiar that Assistant Police Inspector Vasant Dhoble, who had taken the fatal shots at Fawda, was a trigger-happy cop as was evident from his conviction by the Sessions Court in a custodial death case. The High Court said: ``The inquiry Judge (Aguiar) should not have commented about the past antecedents of Dhoble as a SLP in this case is still pending in the Apex Court and the court is not concerned with the previous history of the person...in the Fawda case, Dhoble fired back at Fawda in self-defence.''

The high court also refused to accept Judge Aguiar's contention that Dobhale's failure to preserve the finger prints on the gun used by Fawda went to prove that it was a fake encounter. The division bench pointed out that absence of finger prints did not show that Fawda did not fire at the police. However, the courtpulled up the police for this ``serious investigation lapse.''

The court expressed its surprise at Judge Aguiar's observation that two eye-witnesses in the encounter were not produced before him. The court said that the fact that there were eye-witnesses to the killings was never pointed out by either the petitioners or the police. ``There is no question of eye-witnesses as Ballard Pier is an isolated spot at midnight when the encounter took place,'' the bench said.

Aguiar in his report had pointed out that according to the post-mortem report, Fawda died due to excessive bleeding. ``If there was loss of blood, there should have been a pool of blood at the spot where Fawda was shot and in the car in which he was taken to St Georges Hospital after the encounter, but the spot panchnama does not show any blood at either of the two places,'' Aguiar had added. To this the court observed that the post-mortem report also said that most of the injuries were internal and thus the fact that there was no pool ofblood at the spot was not sur prising.V R Manohar, Shrikant Bhat and Mihir Gheewala appeared for Bombay Police while Majeed Memon and Abbas Kazmi appeared for Samajwadi Party. The court is likely to pass its order in the encounter killings of Pawle and Tandel in a day or two.