A day ahead of the 16th lok Sabha election results, BJP leader Amit Shah received good news as a CBI court on Thursday rejected an application seeking to name him and former Ahmedabad Police Commissioner KR Kaushik as accused in the Ishrat Jahan encounter case.
Gopinath Pillai, father of Pranesh Pillai, alias Javed Sheikh, who was killed in the encounter along with three others, had submitted an application saying that there was evidence against Shah and Kaushik to make them accused in the case.
The CBI had earlier told the court that it did not have any prosecutable evidence against Shah, a close aide of the Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, while Kaushik was a witness in the case and hence, couldn’t be prosecuted.
Pillai’s advocate told the court that the statements of witnesses and Call Detail Records say that Shah and Kaushik were part of the encounter and therefore they should be made accused in this case. The CBI counsel said that the talks between Shah and Kaushik were related to the Rath Yatra.
On June 15, 2004, 19-year-old girl Ishrat Jahan Raza and three others — Pranesh Pillai (alias Javed Gulam Sheikh), Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar — were killed by officers of the Ahmedabad Police Crime Branch in an alleged encounter bid on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. All four were allegedly linked to terrorists. The police then said that Ishrat and her associates were lashkar-e-Tayyeba (leT) operatives involved in a plot to assassinate Modi.