The Central Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday filed an affidavit in a Special Ahmedabad court giving clean chit to former Gujarat Home Minister Amit Shah in the alleged fake encounter of Ishrat Jahan and three others in 2004.
The agency filed the affidavit in response to an application moved about two months ago by Gopinath Pillai, father of Javed Sheikh alias Pranesh Pillai who was killed along with Ishrat by the Gujarat Crime Branch team.
Mr. Pillai had, through his petition, sought inclusion of Mr. Shah and former city police chief K.R. Kaushik as accused in the case. In support of his contention, he enclosed contents of the resignation letter of D.G. Vanzara, suspended IPS officer and one of the accused, tendered last September.
Mr. Vanzara, in his resignation letter, had charged the Gujarat Government with not protecting the police officers who had implemented its then prevailing “conscious policy”.
In its reply, the CBI sought dismissal of Mr. Pillai’s application submitting that there was no sufficient evidence against Mr. Shah. The agency also told the court that Mr. Shah was neither named in the First Information Report nor in the charge sheets filed in the case.
As regards Mr. Vanzara’s letter, the CBI said it did not provide any concrete information about Mr. Shah’s role in the case and only contained general allegations. After the police officer made his resignation letter public, the agency questioned him, but nothing substantial came out of it.
Through the affidavit, the agency also gave a clean chit to Mr. Kaushik submitting that investigations did not throw up any evidence to suggest that he was involved in the conspiracy behind the alleged murders, and that the former city police chief had been made a prosecution witness in the case.
The CBI has, in the >two charge sheets, accused Mr. Vanzara and six of his junior colleagues besides former Intelligence Bureau Joint Director Rajendra Kumar and three other intelligence officers of their complicity in the “fake” encounter of Ishrat and the three others.
