Fresh plea filed in Zakia Jaffery case seeks copy of SIT report

A magisterial court on Thursday issued notices to the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team after social activists Teesta Setalvad and Mukul Sinha filed two separate applications seeking the copies of the SIT report filed in the Zakia Jaffery case.

The court of metropolitan magistrate M S Bhatt issued notices to the SIT and posted the hearing for February 13.

The SIT on Wednesday filed a closure report in the sealed cover on the complaint of Jaffery, wife of former Congress Member of Parliament Eshan Jaffery.

There was no official confirmation on whether the closure report had given a clean chit to Chief Minister Narendra Modi and closed the cases against him.

Jaffrey had sought the prosecution of Modi, along with 57 others, for aiding and abetting communal riots in the state during March 2002.

Ehsan Jaffri was among the 69 people killed in the Gulberg Housing society riots. Nearly 1,200 people were killed in the communal riots that had engulfed the state.

On September 12 last year, the Supreme Court had refused to pass any order on Modi's alleged inaction in containing riots in 2002 and left it to the concerned magistrate's court to decide the course of action against him on the basis of the SIT report.

In the petition, Zakia had alleged that Modi and 62 top government officials deliberately refused to take action to contain the state-wide riots, triggered by the February 27, 2002 Godhra train carnage.

The SC had further said that in case the magistrate decides to drop proceedings against Modi and others, he has to hear the plea of Zakia, who had filed a complaint against the chief minister and others.

Jaffery had told the apex court that a proper probe should be carried out by the SIT, headed by former Central Bureau of Investigation chief R K Raghavan, into her allegations of inaction and various acts of omission and commission by Modi and others during the riots.

The apex court in 2009 had earlier handed over the task of probing the case to the SIT, which submitted its report in 2011.