Ishrat Jahan encounter was fake, claims senior Gujarat cop

AHMEDABAD - The Ishrat Jahan encounter case took a dramatic turn on Friday with Ahmedabad Joint Commissioner of Police Satish Verma, who is one of the three policemen in charge of studying the case, stating that the encounter was fake and staged.

In the affidavit filed before the Gujarat High Court, Verma stated that that early evidence suggests 19-year-old Ishrat was wrongly killed by the police in 2004, and that a separate FIR should be filed against the police officers involved.

Satish Verma has in his 75-page affidavit filed before the Gujarat High Court alleged that some other members of the Special Investigation Team (SIT) did not cooperate in the investigation and that they tried to derail the probe. He has also accused SIT chairman Karnail Singh and a Delhi cop of tampering the investigation.

The new SIT probe team headed by probe team Karnal Singh, a Joint Commissioner of Police in Delhi, has to submit a report within three months to the Gujarat high court after conducting an investigation into the encounter to ascertain whether it was genuine or stage-managed.

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 encounter was carried out by a team of Ahmedabad Crime Branch led by DIG D.G. Vanjara. The police alleged that all four were Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) operatives involved in a plot to assassinate Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

In August 2009, the Ahmedabad Metropolitan court ruled that the killing of Ishrat Jehan was a fake encounter. (ANI)