New Delhi: The scheduled hearing on
post-Godhra riot cases in the Supreme Court will not take
place on Wednesday as one of the three judges will be part of a
constitution bench which is going through a curative petition
in the Bhopal gas tragedy case.
Justice Aftab Alam, one of the judges in the bench
headed by Justice DK Jain to deal with the riot cases, would
be unavailable due to his preoccupation in the day-to-day
hearing in the Bhopal gas tragedy case.
The riots case, earlier posted for hearing on April 26,
was deleted from the list of business of court proceedings.
The apex court was to have perused the SIT's fresh status
report which contains the statements of controversial senior
IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt who in an affidavit made allegations
implicating Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi for
post-Godhra riots.
Bhatt was summoned by the Special Investigating Team
(SIT) headed by former CBI chief RK Raghavan last month on
the directive of the Supreme Court which had asked it to
consider whether further probe was required against Modi and
52 others in the complaint filed by Zakia Jafri, widow of
former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri who was burnt to death at his
Gulbarga Society residence in Ahmedabad.
Bhatt, a 1988-batch IPS officer who was posted as DCP at
the State Intelligence Bureau (SIB) during the 2002 riots,
filed an affidavit on April 14 in the apex court saying he had
attended the February 27, 2002, meeting called by Modi where
he asked officers to be "indifferent" to the rioters.
Bhatt is currently posted as the principal of the State
Reserve Police Training Centre in Junagadh.
The SIT has in its status report also mentioned about a
letter written by suspended Gujarat IAS official Pradeep
Sharma requesting to be allowed to depose on information
received from the CM's office during the period.
PTI
First Published: Tuesday, April 26, 2011, 23:03