Fresh probe into Gujarat girl ‘encounter’ death

Five years after she was gunned down as an alleged Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorist, Gujarat High Court has ordered a probe that would establish if indeed Ishrat Jahan was a fidayeen or simply a college student felled by trigger-happy policemen.

The court has set up a three-member committee of senior IPS officers to investigate afresh the June 2004 killing of Ishrat by the crime branch of the state police, at least three of whose officials are now behind bars for an alleged fake encounter in 2005 that killed Sohrabuddin Sheikh.

Ishrat, then 19 and a first-year student at GN Khalsa College in Matunga, Mumbai, was shot dead while travelling in a car along with three others on the outskirts of Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004.

Also in the car were Pune-based Javed Shaikh alias Pranesh Pillai, Ajmal Ali Rana from Kashmir and Jisan Johar from Pakistan. Ishrat was apparently known to Javed, who, the police claimed, had trained in terror camps in Pakistan.

The city crime branch, then headed by the now jailed IPS officer D.G. Vanzara, had claimed that all four were Lashkar operatives out on a mission to kill chief minister Narendra Modi. Vanzara, Rajkumar Pandian, also an IPS officer, and Narendra Amin, the then deputy superintendent of police, were among the crime branch officers involved in the “encounter”.

All three are now lodged in Sabarmati Central Jail for the alleged encounter in which Sohrabuddin was killed in November 2005.

Soon after her daughter’s death, Ishrat’s mother Shamima Kausar had challenged the Gujarat police claim that the student was also a terrorist and demanded a CBI probe into the alleged encounter. She said Ishrat was killed in a fake encounter and was not linked to any terrorist organisation.

Five years passed but nothing happened. Now with the Supreme Court monitoring the re-investigation of 2002 riot cases, the scanner has also shifted to the so-called encounter deaths that have taken place in the Narendra Modi regime.

Shamima’s lawyer Mukul Sinha argued in court that the agency (crime branch) which killed Ishrat had also carried out the probe and branded her a “terrorist”, which, he contended, was not fair investigation.

Justice K.S. Zhaveri accepted his contention. “In the present case, the complainant is from the crime branch, the person who recorded the statement is also from the crime branch, the encounter was carried out by the crime branch and the investigation was also carried out by the crime branch. Therefore, one cannot expect fair investigation from the same agency,” Zhaveri said.

The court set up a high-level committee — headed by an officer of the rank of additional director-general of police — to carry out a fresh investigation and submit a report within three months.

Zhaveri randomly picked out three names from a list of IPS officers provided by the government. The panel will be headed by additional director-general of police Pramod Kumar. The other members are Ahmedabad joint commissioner Mohan Jha and deputy inspector-general J.K. Bhatt.

Source: The Telegraph