The Intelligence Bureau has told the Supreme Court that CBI is implicating its officers without verifying the facts in the 2004 alleged fake encounter killing of Ishrat Jahan and three others in Gujarat.
“Despite full cooperation extended by IB in the course of investigation in this case, CBI seems to have filed a chargesheet in this case implicating four IB officers without fully verifying all the relevant facts,” the IB affidavit said.It also placed in a sealed envelope secret inputs it had received about terrorist activities of lashkar-e-Tayyeba which was trying to eliminate senior BJP leader l K Advani and the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
The IB referred to the June 25, 2010 letter received from legal Attache, posted in the US Embassy in Delhi, mentioning some information about Ishrat Jahan which became available to the FBI officers during the interrogation of David Coleman Headley.The affidavit assumes significance in view of the second supplementary chargesheet filed by CBI on February 6 naming former IB Special Director Rajinder Kumar and three others for being “involved” in the case. Three other officers named are P Mittal, MK Sinha and Rajeev Wankhede.
The IB in its affidavit elaborated the sequences of events that led to the encounter in which 19-year-old Ishrat Jahan, Javed Sheikh alias Pranesh Pillai, Zeeshan Johar and Amjad Ali Rana were killed on June 15, 2004. It was alleged that they were on a mission to eliminate the then Chief Minister Narendra Modi. CBI claimed that the encounter was “fake” and all four were killed in cold blood.
In its first chargesheet, CBI had named Gujarat’s suspended Deputy Superintendent of Police NK Amin and six other police officers that included Gl Singhal, retired DSP J G Parmar, Mehsana Deputy SP Tarun Barot and commando Anaju Chaudhary. It had alleged the incident to be a joint operation of state police and Intelligence Bureau.