The Central Bureau of Investigation has issued a summons to senior IPS official Rajendra Kumar for allegedly generating fake IB alerts, ahead of the encounter killing of Ishrat Jahan, to the effect that the Mumbai girl and three others had links with the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the four were out on a mission to assassinate Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
Simultaneously on Wednesday, a petition was filed by Shabir Jamal, brother of Sadiq Jamal, another alleged fake encounter victim, complaining of a dubious role by the same Information Bureau official in fabricating inputs that Sadiq was out to kill Mr. Modi and other senior BJP leaders.
Sadiq was a scooter mechanic in Saurashtra’s Bhavnagar city. The CBI is looking into this case as well.
These two incidents as well as two alleged gun battles post-2002 Gujarat riots up to 2004 have been declared fake encounters or so alleged. Eight people were killed.
All the encounters took place in early hours, all near Ahmedabad and all the victims — they were allegedly out to kill Mr. Modi — died at the hands of the Ahmedabad Crime Branch police, whose boss then, D.G. Vanzara, is now behind bars in the Sohrabuddin Shaikh fake encounter case.
Four other police officials are also involved in this as well as Sadiq encounter case.
Mr. Kumar served as IB Joint Director in Gujarat between late 2001 and early 2005.
The encounters under Mr. Vanzara happened on the basis of “intelligence inputs” of threat to Mr. Modi generated only after October 2002.
Human rights activists, lawyers and retired senior police officials have been saying for long that it was Mr. Kumar who tipped off Mr. Vanzara and company. It is on record that most of those who were bumped off had only a history of petty crime but were later linked with terror groups who had a singular purpose of eliminating Mr. Modi, L. K Advani and senior Vishwa Hindu Parishad leaders.
In the Ishrat Jahan case, the first finding that the encounter was fake came in 2009 from metropolitan magistrate S.P. Tamang, whose report maintained that the girl and three others had been kidnapped by sleuths of the Ahmedabad Crime Branch from Mumbai on June 12, 2004, brought here and killed in cold blood in furtherance of personal interests like promotions and gaining appreciation from the Chief Minister.
As for the 2003 Sadiq encounter case, Shabir Jamal, in his petition, sought further investigation into the alleged profiling of his brother as a terrorist, and the role and conduct of Mr. Kumar (now posted in New Delhi) in “hatching a conspiracy to illegally detain and confine Sadiq Jamal in their [IB] office at Bungalow 15, Sahibaug, Ahmedabad.”
