After David Headley’s deposition before the Mumbai court through video conferencing, calling Ishrat Jahan, who was killed along with three others in an encounter by the Gujarat police, as a terrorist linked with the Pakistan-based Lashkar e Toiba (LeT), the Gujarat government slammed the Congress party for “politicising the encounter case and defaming the State government as well as the police.”
The State government claimed that its stand on the controversial encounter in which four persons allegedly linked with the terror outfit were killed in a shootout was “vindicated”.
“We have always maintained that it was a genuine encounter and those killed where terrorists,” said Minister of State for Home Rajni Patel, accusing the previous UPA government of “playing politics on the issue of national security”.
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The Gujarat High Court had created a three-member Special Investigation team (SIT), which had submitted a detailed report in the case calling the encounter fake, based on the statements of witnesses, forensic and material evidence.
The SIT had held in its report that the four persons were in the custody of the Ahmedabad crime branch and were brought to the spot where they were killed by the police. The SIT also claimed that the weapons recovered from them were also planted by the police personnel involved in the staged shootout. In December 2011, the case was transferred to the CBI, which too, after an investigation, endorsed the SIT findings.