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Ishrat Jahan case reaches a dead end after CBI court discharges 3 cops

The officers were discharged after Gujarat govt refused to grant prosecution sanction

Ishrat-Jahan Ishrat Jahan

The Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case has been a tale of missing papers, changing affidavits and successive clean chits to police officers. The case finally reached a dead end on Wednesday after a special CBI court discharged police officers G.L. Singhal, Tarun Barot and Anaju Chaudhary. The three police officers were discharged after the central agency told the court that the Gujarat government had refused to grant prosecution sanction against them. Earlier, former IG D.G. Vanzara, P.P. Pandey and N.K. Amin had been discharged by the court. The CBI did not appeal against the discharge of these officers, which makes it unlikely that the central agency will file an appeal against the latest order. 

The question on whether these officers had acted in their official duty has been put to rest for now as far as the CBI probe is concerned, said officials who have been following the case.

However, the fake encounter case can still create ripples if the Union home ministry decides to take action in the case of missing documents in 2016 in which the Delhi police had filed an FIR. The MHA was told by a one-man committee, headed by B.K. Prasad, that certain crucial papers had gone missing in 2009 during the tenure of the previous UPA government. The MHA was mulling legal action that time but since the CBI inquiry was still going on, there wasn’t much headway after Prasad submitted his report, an official said.

The 51-page Ishrat file, which had been locked away in the office of the joint secretary in-charge of internal security in North Block, was taken out in 2016 after a controversy blew up over documents going missing from the file. An inquiry was launched into the missing papers by then Home Minister Rajnath Singh who asked B.K. Prasad, additional secretary, to find out how the papers went missing from the high security ministry office. It was found during the probe that the documents had allegedly gone missing during the tenure of the previous UPA government in 2009. However, the probe did not name any person responsible for the missing papers.

However, it was learnt that those papers contained crucial information of the case like Ishrat Jahan’s links to an LeT terror module tasked to kill Prime Minister Narendra Modi , who was then the chief minister of Gujarat.

A political blame game ensued between senior Congress leader and former home minister P. Chidambaram and the BJP after former home secretary G.K. Pillai came out with an explosive statement alleging that it was Chidambaram who directed that a further affidavit be made after incorporating changes in the original affidavit in the case. Pillai said one of the missing documents was a covering letter from him to then attorney general Ghoolam E. Vahanavati in which he had said that the draft of the further affidavit had Chidambaram’s approval. The case of missing papers is still pending with the Delhi Police. 

Nineteen-year-old Ishrat Jahan, from Mumbra near Mumbai, was killed along with Javed Shaikh alias Pranesh Pillai, Amjadali Akbarali Rana and Zeeshan Johar by Gujarat police in an 'encounter' near Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004. The police claimed that the four were terrorists, but a high court-appointed SIT had concluded it was a fake encounter, after which the CBI probe began.

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