The Gujarat High Court on Thursday directed the Central Bureau of Investigation to take over the investigation into the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case.
Stating that the Gujarat police could not be “relied upon” to conduct an impartial probe, the High Court asked the CBI to consider the case as an “exceptional one having national ramifications.”
A Division Bench, comprising Justices Jayant Patel and Abhilasha Kumari, also directed chairman of the High Court-appointed Special Investigation Team Rajiv Ranjan Verma to file a fresh FIR within a fortnight and hand over all relevant papers and documents to the CBI.
The case relates to the gunning down of Mumbra (Mumbai)-based college girl Ishrat Jahan and three others — Pranesh Pillai alias Javed Sheikh, and two alleged Pakistani terrorists — by the Gujarat crime branch police near Kotarpur on the outskirts of Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004.
While the investigation so far by the SIT was limited to establishing whether the encounter was “genuine” as claimed by the Gujarat police, the CBI has been directed by the High Court to also look into an alleged terror angle. The Gujarat police had claimed that Ishrat and the other three were Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives and in Gujarat on a mission to kill Chief Minister Narendra Modi to avenge the 2002 carnage.
The three-member SIT, which submitted its report to the Division Bench last month, had come to the conclusion that the encounter was “not genuine” and that the four were killed much earlier.
The High Court asked State cadre IPS officer Satish Verma, who was a member of the SIT and had expressed a willingness to continue with the probe if so desired by the court, to provide all assistance to the CBI. It directed the State government to spare him whenever the agency required his help.
Rejecting the State government's plea to allow the police to investigate the case, the Bench said such an inquiry would not only be not “reliable,” but also fail to instil confidence among the victims and the public in general because of the involvement of a number of senior police officers in the fake encounter.
Besides, “all top officials of the State up to the rank of the then DGP may fall within the ambit of the investigation in connection with the registration of another/fresh FIR,” and therefore investigation by the State police would not be desirable. The Bench also recorded the possibility of the police tampering with evidence to protect its officers.
This would be the fourth encounter case to be investigated by the CBI. The Central agency, at the behest of the Supreme Court, was already investigating the fake encounter death of Sohrabuddin Sheikh in November, 2005 and the “mysterious disappearance” of his wife Kausarbi; the encounter killing of his close associate, Tulsiram Prajapati, a year later; and the killing of Sadiq Jamal Mehtar in January 2003.
