A Division Bench of the Gujarat High Court on Wednesday reserved order till December 1 on the appointment of an agency for a fresh probe into the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case.
Since the State government did not press for handing over the case to the State police, the probe was now open to being assigned to the Central Bureau of Investigation, the National Investigation Agency, a reconstituted Special Investigation Team or the same three-member SIT headed by the Bihar cadre IPS officer, Rajiv Ranjan Verma.
The three-member SIT, in its final report announced by the court on Monday, concluded that the June 15, 2004 “encounter” in which Ishrat Jahan and three others were killed by the Ahmedabad crime branch police was “not a genuine one.”
As the hearing resumed on Wednesday, Union government counsel Pankaj Champaneri informed the court that the CBI was “over burdened” and would not be willing to take over the new case, and suggested that the NIA be assigned the job. However, Justice Jayant Patel, who, along with Justice Abhilasha Kumari, was on the Bench, pointed out that the very purpose of constituting the NIA was to investigate terror cases, while the main issue before the court was establishing the persons guilty of “murder” of four individuals in a stage-managed encounter. The NIA could only investigate the possible terror-links of the four whom the State police had claimed to be Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives on a mission to assassinate Chief Minister Narendra Modi and others.
Advocate-General Kamal Trivedi on Monday suggested that the case be handed over to the State police, particularly because two of the three-member SIT, Mohan Jha and Satish Verma, who were Gujarat cadre IPS officers, did not further press the demand and said the State government would accept a CBI probe into the matter if it was under the direct supervision of the High Court.
Counsel for Ishrat's mother Shamima Kausar and Gopinathan Pillai, father of Javed Sheikh alias Pranesh Pillai, who was killed with Ishrat, however, wanted the same SIT to continue with the probe since it was already seized of the matter.
