CBI probe on Ishrat: HC reserves order till Aug 12

Gujarat high court on Thursday 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 formed by the apex court 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.

On Thursday, 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.