Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi on Thursday rubbished a media report that a witness was tutored in the course of inquiry into the missing documents related to the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case. “I hotly deny tutoring of witnesses. Files in the Home Ministry are never lost. They might get misplaced. But I am confident they will be located somewhere. The file is in Home Ministry,” Mehrishi told reporters in Mumbai when asked for comment on a newspaper report.
According to the report, BK Prasad, Additional Secretary in the Home Ministry, coached a former Director of the Ministry in April this year on questions he would be putting to the officer and how the latter should answer that he had never seen the purported missing papers.
Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju said the former Union Home Minister P Chidambaram tried to give a clean chit to Ishrat Jahan.
"We have already got the reports by the one-man committee constituted by the Ministry of Home Affairs. We have seen the report and some of the important documents are still untraceable. And the intention is very clear. How these important documents are taken out of the records in the Home Ministry and why a hardcore terrorist was declared as innocent through an affidavitIJ" Rijiju said.
Meanwhile, in a statement, probe officer Prasad denied any sort of tutoring and blamed the newspaper for " unethical" recording of his conversation with another officer. "Secondly, what is he saying is only one side of the conversation, without being aware of what the other side, ie : Ashok Kumar was asking or clarifying with me," said Prasad.
Ashok Kumar worked in MHA as Director between January and December in 2011 and the alleged file manipulation happened in September 2009. "…and the question which has been quoted from my alleged conversation was never asked from Ashok Kumar and the answer which is quoted by the newspaper was never given by him. I am enclosing the verbatim of the statement and questions put by me and answers given by Ashok Kumar which will put the record straight," said Prasad.
"All officers enquired by me have been senior officers in the Government and are fully capable of answering questions relating to the probe on their own and there is no question of the alleged 'tutoring'," he added.