SIT’s report on Zakia complaint in 5 weeks

Should it also submit amicus curiae's report to trial court?

The Special Investigation Team headed by R.K. Raghavan will take another four or five weeks to submit to the Ahmedabad Magistrate Court its final report on the probe into the complaint of Zakia Jafri, wife of the former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri, who was killed in the Gulberg Society carnage during the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat.

Disposing of her complaint against Chief Minister Narendra Modi and 61 others, the Supreme Court on September 12 asked the SIT to submit its report to the trial court. It also asked the SIT to take a final decision on her complaint.

Amicus curiae Raju Ramachandran was asked to give his comments on the SIT's final report.

Highly placed sources in the SIT told

The Hindu: “We want to implement the Supreme Court direction in letter and in spirit. However, since there is no positive direction to the SIT to submit the amicus curiae 's report along with its final report, we have sought legal opinion.” It was pointed out that the Supreme Court had merely said, “We direct the Chairman, SIT, to forward a final report, along with the entire material collected by the SIT, to the court which had taken cognisance of Crime Report No.67 of 2002, as required under Section 173(2) of the Criminal Procedure Code. Before submission of its report, it will be open to the SIT to obtain from the amicus curiae copies of his reports submitted to this court.”

The sources said the SIT's report would take into consideration the amicus curiae 's comments and “the only area where we need clarification is whether his report should be presented to the trial court along with our final report. We will act as per the legal opinion as we don't want criticism from any quarter. Though the Supreme Court has not fixed any time limit for filing the final report, we would like to complete the process in four to five weeks.”