“The Central Bureau of Investigation is pressuring me to falsely implicate the former Gujarat Minister, Amit Shah, in the Sohrabuddin fake encounter case,” Rajkot Police Commissioner Geeta Johri has alleged in the Supreme Court.
In her curative petition, the IPS officer, who earlier investigated the case, sought recall of the court's January 12 order entrusting the probe to the CBI. She filed the curative petition after the court dismissed her plea for review of the January 12 order, in which it strongly indicted her. As she could not oblige the CBI, the agency threatened to frame her in the case in a bid to pressure her to implicate Mr. Shah, Ms. Johri said.
“Political angle”
Alleging a political angle, she said that ever since the CBI began the probe it had started exerting pressure on Gujarat police officers, including her, to either name the political personalities, including Mr. Shah, or stand charged as accused in the killings of Sohrabuddin, his wife Kausar Bi and Tulsiram Prajapati, an accomplice of Sohrabuddin.
Ms. Johri said the court's observations against her were made without hearing her and were based on incorrect and inadequate representation, and this exposed her to the serious risk of threats and blackmail by the CBI.
“It is by exploiting such remarks that the CBI is trying to exert pressure on me and is asking me to implicate political persons, like Mr. Shah, or face arrest and prosecution in default.”
Ms. Johri also questioned the judicial propriety of Justice Tarun Chatterjee (since retired), who headed a Bench, ordering a CBI probe when he himself was under CBI probe in the Ghaziabad Provident Fund scam.
The selectively “conspired” leaks by the CBI to the press wherein latent threats of impending arrest or cadre change, or ridiculous attacks on her family were carried in newspapers all over Gujarat, in a Mafioso style, causing sustained damage to the constitutional rights and in-service immunities of an Indian Civil Servant, Ms. Johri said.
