In a first, the CBI on Thursday chargesheeted three serving Intelligence Bureau (IB) officials, besides retired IB Special Director Rajinder Kumar, in the Ishrat Jehan encounter case at a designated court in Ahmedabad. However, the supplementary charge-sheet does not mention the name of Guajrat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s close aide Amit Shah, who was sought to be implicated in the controversial encounter of 19-year lashkar-e-Tayyeba operative Ishrat Jahan and three of her associates — Pranesh Pillai, alias Javed Sheikh, Amzad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar.
While Kumar — who headed the Subsidiary Intelligence Bureau (SIB) in Gujarat at the time of the encounter — has been charged with criminal conspiracy, murder, illegal confinement, abduction, and some sections under the Arms Act, the three serving IB officials have been chargesheeted for all these offences minus murder. The three serving officials named in the chargesheet include the then Assistant Central Intelligence Officers, P Mittal, MK Sinha and Rajiv Wankhede.
The supplementary charge-sheet comes after seven months of filing of the first charge-sheet in the case on July 3, 2013. The supplementary charge-sheet was filed before additional chief judicial magistrate HS Khutwad. leT operative Ishrat Jahan and three of her associates were allegedly killed by Gujarat Crime Branch officers on the outskirts of Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004.
However, according to Gujarat Police’s claims, they had received inputs from the SIB that Ishrat Jahan and three of her associates were terrorists and were on move to assassinate Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
In the primary charge-sheet, the CBI had named seven top cops for murder, conspiracy and destruction of evidence, illegal confinement, abduction and other sections of the Arms Act. The State police officials chargesheeted in the case include additional director general of police PP Pandey, DIG DG Vanzara, superintendent of police Gl Singhal, deputy superintendents NK Amin, Tarun Barot and JG Parmar, besides Anaju Chaudhary. The CBI didn’t find any charges against nine policemen whose statements were recorded under section 169 of the CrPC.
The Intelligence Bureau has claimed that though it alerted the Gujarat Police about the possibility that the Ishrat Jahan group was affiliated to the Pakistani terror group leT, its officers did not authorise or participate in the extra-judicial killing. However, in the first charge-sheet in July, the CBI accused seven senior policemen of murdering Ishrat and the others “in cold blood” and of planting an AK-56 at the scene of the shooting to portray the victims as terrorists.
The CBI alleged that Kumar provided the weapons to the Crime Branch officials. The Gujarat High Court had handed over the case to the CBI in December 16, 2011 to probe if the encounter was genuine or stage-managed. According to the CBI charge-sheet, accused officials of Gujarat Police and IB were “instrumental” in securing illegal custody of the four persons who were subsequently abducted and later killed in a fake encounter.