By TwoCircles.net Staff Reporter,
New Delhi: After Sohrabuddin now another encounter has turned out to be fake. The 2004 Ishrat Jahan police encounter was staged, said a judicial probe on September 7. The college student Ishrat Jahan and three of her friends were killed outside Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004, said the judicial probe constituted following pressure from her parent.
The Gujarat Police had claimed that Ishrat, Javed Gulam Sheikh alias Pranesh Pillai, Amjad Ali and Jisan Abdul Gani were Laskar-e-Toiba terrorists and they were planning to kill Chief Minister Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
“Ishrat was innocent and was killed only because she was a Muslim and fitted the Gujarat Police’s idea of a terrorist,” says a 243-page damning report by Magistrate SP Tamang.
The encounter was conducted by the Ahmedabad police’s Detention of Crime Branch, which was then led by IPS officer D G Vanzara, who is in judicial custody in connection with an another alleged fake encounter case.
The report says the police carried out this fake encounter to get rewards and promotions. “To curry favour with the Chief Minister they also floated a story that she and her associates had come to eliminate him,” says the report.
Among the 20 policemen accused of her murder are Gujarat Additional DGP (Intelligence) P C Pandey, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Gujarat ATS) G L Singhal, Retired Police Commissioner K R Kaushik, Police Inspector with Ahmedabad Crime Branch Tarun Barot, and the then Additional Police Commissioner (Crime Branch) D G Vanazara and then Assistant Commissioner of Police N K Amin. The last two are already in jail in connection the Sohrabudddin fake encounter case.