Delhi police begin probe into missing files of Ishrat case
NEW DELHI: Police lodged an FIR on missing documents from the Union home ministry files on the alleged extra-judicial killing of Ishrat Jahan, a Mumbai college girl suspected to be a terrorist and shot dead in 2004.
The Delhi police move could trigger another round of political battle between the Congress and BJP.
The 19-year-old girl was killed by Gujarat police in Ahmedabad along with Javed Shaikh alias Pranesh Pillai and two Pakistanis, Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Zohar. Gujarat police said they were Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists who had visited the state to kill Narendra Modi, the chief minister then.
The case has seen many twists and turns, the latest being the missing papers.
The ministry has asked police to find out under what circumstances five crucial documents related to preparation of a second affidavit in the Ishrat case went missing.
During Congress leader P Chidambaram’s tenure as Union home minister, the ministry had filed two affidavits in 2009.
The first had details about her alleged terrorist links, but those were omitted in the second, filed more than a month later.
GK Pillai, who was home secretary then, said the second affidavit was changed at the political level, indicating Chidambaram’s involvement.
But the former home minister had clarified that since a magisterial inquiry in Gujarat had termed the shooting as staged, an additional affidavit was filed. That states it was the responsibility of the state police to act on intelligence inputs provided by the Centre.
Later, home minister Rajnath Singh told Lok Sabha that crucial documents from the Ishrat files were missing and constituted the panel headed by senior home ministry official BK Prasad to inquire into it.
The missing documents included a draft of the second affidavit that Chidambaram had corrected.
The Prasad panel submitted a 52-page report to home secretary Rajiv Mehrishi, saying five missing documents pertaining to the preparation of the ministry’s second affidavit were removed knowingly, unknowingly or misplaced between September 18 and 28, 2009, when the UPA was in power.
But the panel came under question, with Chidambaram calling its report doctored as Prasad has been accused of tutoring a witness.
The FIR, registered last Thursday, is likely to raise the political temperature as the Congress has maintained that the second affidavit was necessary because a magisterial report in Gujarat had termed the Ishrat’s killing as staged.
But the BJP has alleged that the Ishrat inquiry was politically motivated with an objective to target the then Gujarat chief minister Modi.
Based on petitions from Pranesh Pillai’s father and Ishrat’s mother, the Gujarat high court had handed the probe to the CBI, which chargesheeted more half a dozen state policemen and four serving and retired officers of the Intelligence Bureau, including its then Ahmedabad station chief Rajinder Kumar. But the home ministry did not give the CBI sanction to prosecute Kumar and other IB officials.”