Gujarat appeal against SIT probe in Ishrat case dismissed

In exceptional cases, High Court can form special team: Supreme Court

File photo of Ishrat Jahan's sister Musarat Jahan and their mother Shamima in New Delhi.

The Supreme Court has declined to interfere with a Gujarat High Court order appointing a Special Investigation Team to probe the alleged fake encounter killing of Ishrat Jahan, Javed Sheikh and two others in 2004.

Initially the High Court entrusted the probe to the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team, which is going into the some of the graver cases of massacre which occurred during the 2002 communal violence in Gujarat. But when the SIT, headed by the former CBI Director R.K. Raghavan, expressed its difficulty in taking up the Ishrat case probe, the Supreme Court asked the High Court to consider appointing an appropriate agency. Accordingly by the High Court, by a September 24 order, ordered the constitution of a separate SIT. The Gujarat Government moved the Supreme Court challenging this order.

A Bench of Justices B. Sudershan Reddy and S.S. Nijjar, before whom the appeal came up for admission on Friday, rejected the State's plea that the SIT constituted by the State government in 2009 be allowed to continue. Senior counsel Harish Salve and Mukul Rohatgi argued that the High Court had no power to constitute another SIT when an agency was already conducting the probe.

Justice Reddy told counsel: “How can the State come up with such a plea? The High Court is not deprived of its power. In exceptional cases, it can constitute a special investigation team. In the facts of the case, we find no reason to interfere.”

Mr. Salve submitted that a petition filed by the People's Union for Civil Liberties on shootout killings, seeking to lay down guidelines, was pending before the court and notices were to the Centre and the States.

Gujarat, in its appeal, said teenager Ishrat and the others, who were killed on the outskirts of Ahmedabad on July 14, 2004, were Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives. There was no allegation of bias or prejudice against the SIT, which was probing the case but was subsequently dissolved.

The case came to the fore after Ahmedabad Metropolitan Magistrate S. P. Tamang, who conducted a judicial inquiry, concluded that it was a fake encounter by the Gujarat police. He indicted 21 police officers. The State challenged Mr. Tamang's order but the High Court refused to set it aside.