Ishrat Jahan encounter was fake: SIT tells Gujarat HC

Ahmedabad - 22 Nov 2011:A Special Investigation Team today told the Gujarat High Court that the Ishrat Jahan encounter of 2004 was fake. The High Court ordered FIR to be filed against guilty police officers and men responsible for the killing.

For further investigation and indentifying the guilty, the High Court has heard all parties today and decided on three options -- CBI, NIA and the same SIT. Victims' families want the same SIT to continue while two members of the SIT want to be relieved as according to them their mandated work is over. Central govt has been notified which will consult the home ministry on CBI or NIA. Court will now decide on one option on November 23 at 4 pm.

The judgement came in the wake of probes and reports that the encounter was fake. Teenager Ishrat Jahan was killed along with three others by the Crime Branch of Ahmedabad Police on June 14, 2004 which alleged that all four were members of the LeT and were planning to kill chief minister Narendra Modi.

Allegations of the encounter being staged surfaced immediately. A one-man commission of Ahmedabad Metropolitan Magistrate SP Tamang was set up to probe the incident. In his 243-page report, Tamang said that Ahmedabad Police encounter specialist Dhananjay Vanjara and his team kidnapped the four from Mumbai on June 12, 2004, killed them in cold blood in police custody on June 14, 2004 and staged it as encounter on the outskirts of Ahmedabad next morning.

Vanjara is in jail on allegations of another fake encounter - killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife in 2005.

Tamang report said Vanjara and his team carried out the murders to appease Modi and get out of turn promotions. On October 7, a division bench of justices Jayant Patel and Abhilasha Kumari had directed the SIT to submit the final report that would conclude if the encounter was genuine or fake. Ishrat was a college going 19-year-old. Others killed were Javed Sheikh alias Pranesh Pillai, Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar.

The probe in the case was supervised directly by the high court which constituted the SIT last year to investigate the genuineness of the encounter after petitions were filed by Ishrat's mother Shamima Kausar and Gopinath Pillai, father of Pranesh.

In his report Tamang has held responsible top police officers for the killings. Besides Vanzara, his junior in Crime Branch Narendra K Amin, the then Ahmedabad Police Commissioner KR Kaushik, the then chief of the Crime Branch PP Pandey and Tarun Barot have been named in the Tamang report. Amin is also in jail with Vanjara in the Soharabuddin case.

Tamang report said that rigor mortis - or stiffness in the body after death - had already set in the previous night and it proves that the policemen pumped bullets next morning into lifeless bodies. The report also said that the explosives and weapons allegedly seized from the TATA Indica car, that police claimed was being used by the four in driving from Mumbai to Ahmedabad, were all planted by the police team.

The report rubbished the claims of the police that Ishrat and other had anything to do with LeT.

source: newsbullet.in