Ahmedabad: Gujarat High Court today reserved
order till August 12 into the petitions demanding CBI probe in
the 2004 encounter of Ishrat Jahan and three others.
After hearing arguments for over one week, the division
bench of Justice Jayant Patel and Justice Abhilasha Kumari
asked the state government to provide certain details
including the investigation report submitted by investigation
officer Parixita Gurjar in the case.
The court has also directed the government to furnish
the report of the inquiry carried out by the Additional
Director General of Police, CID (IB) J Mahapatra in the case.
It also asked state government to provide lists of IPS
officers in the Special Investigation Team (SIT) formed by SC
to probe into some of the post-Godhra 2002 riots cases, names
of CBI officers probing Sohrabuddin fake encounter case, list
of top three officers of ATS and CID officers probing the
Tulsiram Prajapati fake encounter case.
The court said that it may reconstitute the SIT earlier
formed by Justice K S Jhaveri to probe Ishrat Jahan encounter
case.
Ishrat was gunned down by Gujarat police along with
Javed Ghulam Sheikh alias Pranesh Kumar Pillai, Amjad Ali
alias Rajkumar Akbar Ali Rana and Jisan Johar Abdul Gani in
Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004.
The state government on one hand had opposed inclusion
of any CBI officer in the proposed SIT, while parents of the
deceased insisted on CBI probe and objected to the case being
probed by any of the officers of Gujarat police.
Petitioners, during the arguments, had highlighted
that one of the members of present SIT, Mohan Jha is
additional in-charge of the city crime branch, against whom
the investigation is to take place.
They also submitted that the head of CID (Crime) at
present is ADGP P P Pande, who has already been named in the
judicial magistrate S P Tamang`s report which had stated that
the encounter was fake.
The CBI had also made it clear that it would be able
to probe the case much better, if entire investigation is
transferred to them.
Today, I H Sayyed, lawyer representing Ishrat`s mother
Shamima Kausar, submitted before the court that in order to
prove Tamang report perverse, the state government has used
straight downloads from Wikipedia to counter its own forensic
laboratory`s ballistic reports.
He said that the website, on which state government
relies, is updated by anonymous person and number of times
information is changed on its pages.
PTI
