BJP uses sting CD to defend former Gujarat HM

The Bharatiya Janata Party on Tuesday used a sting operation by a news channel to defend former Gujarat Home Minister Amit Shah in the Sohrabuddin encounter case, and claimed that the Central Bureau Investigation was being forced to press "politically motivated" and "malafide" charges against him.

In the sting operation, conducted by a Hindi news channel, Sohrabuddin's brother Niyamuddin and one Azam Khan - an alleged member of Sohrabuddin gang - are shown making charges that CBI Investigating Officer D S Dagar had arbitrarily added paragraphs to their statement to the agency.

The VCD of the sting, which was shown to the media at the BJP headquarters in Delhi, claims that the firing at Popular Builders premises was not done by the police at the behest of Shah - as stated in the CBI chargesheet - but by Sohrabuddin himself after its owners, Patel brothers, reneged on a promise to pay him for a job.

"The shocking truth disclosed by the witnesses reaffirms the stand of the party that the investigation of the Sohrabuddin case is politically motivated, malafide and biased for a defined extraneous political purpose," BJP Chief spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad said.

Prasad insisted that the CBI has arbitrarily added paragraphs in the statements of witnesses to implicate Shah.

"The nation has known that the CBI team has verbatim reproduced the earlier statements of the witnesses recorded by the Gujarat police and have added some paragraphas on its own implicating Shah as per the voluntary statement of Niyamuddin in the sting operation," he said.