Former Union Home Secretary GK Pillai may be examined by the one-man enquiry panel probing the issue of missing files related to the case of encounter killing of the leT terrorist Ishrat Jahan. “The panel will examine all officers serving or retired who have dealt with the Ishrat Jahan related files,” an official privy to the deliberations in the Home Ministry said.
However, Home Ministry officials are tight-lipped on whether the panel would examine then Home Minister P Chidambaram. Pillai was Union Home Secretary when the Home Ministry had filed two contradictory affidavits in the Gujarat High Court in 2009 on the Ishrat Jahan case. The enquiry, by Additional Secretary in the Home Ministry BK Prasad, was ordered by the Home Ministry after it was found that some papers related to the Ishrat Jahan case went missing.
The probe panel has been mandated to enquire into the circumstances in which the files related to the case of Ishrat Jahan, the 19-year-old Mumbra college student who was killed in an alleged fake encounter in 2004, went missing. The panel will find out the person responsible for keeping the files and relevant issues.
The papers, which went missing from the Home Ministry, include the copy of an affidavit vetted by the Attorney General and submitted in the Gujarat High Court in 2009 and the draft of the second affidavit vetted by the AG on which changes were made. Two letters written by then Home Secretary GK Pillai to the then Attorney General late GE Vahanvati and the copy of the draft affidavit have so far been untraceable. Home Minister Rajnath Singh had disclosed in Parliament on March 10 that the files were missing.
The first affidavit was filed on the basis of inputs from Maharashtra and Gujarat Police besides the Intelligence Bureau where it was said that the 19-year-old girl from Mumbai outskirts was a lashkar-e-Taiba activist but it was ignored in the second affidavit, Home Ministry officials said.
The second affidavit, claimed to have been drafted by the then Home Minister P Chidambaram, said there was no conclusive evidence to prove that Ishrat was a terrorist, officials said. Pillai had recently claimed that as Home Minister, Chidambaram had recalled the file a month after the original affidavit, which described Ishrat and her slain aides as leT operatives, was filed in the court. Subsequently, Chidambaram had said that Pillai is equally responsible for the change in the affidavit.
Rajnath Singh had accused the erstwhile UPA government of hatching a “deep conspiracy” to frame Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he was the Gujarat Chief Minister in the Ishrat Jahan case. Singh had said that the previous government had done a ‘flip-flop’ on the links of Ishrat Jahan with terror outfit leT.