The CBI on Wednesday gave a clean chit to former Gujarat home minister Amit Shah, a close aide of BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, in the Ishrat Jahan encounter case.
Submitting its report to a special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court in Ahmedabad, the probe agency said there was no conclusive evidence of Shah being involved or even ordering the encounter shooting of Ishrat Jahan in 2004, which eventually turned out to be a fake one.
Wednesday's verdict followed the CBI's earlier clean chit to Shah in February in connection with a supplementary chargesheet.
Reports quoted CBI sources as saying that the Intelligence Bureau (IB) officials, including Rajinder Kumar, would be chargesheeted under conspiracy in the encounter case.
Rajinder Kumar was involved in the planning from the beginning till the end, and he allegedly planned and executed the encounter with the help of Gujarat Police.
The Ishrat Jahan encounter took place on June 15, 2004. Besides Ishrat Jahan Raza, a 19-year old girl from Mumbai, the case involved encounter killings of three men – Pranesh Pillai (alias Javed Gulam Sheikh), Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar – by officers of the Ahmedabad Police Crime Branch. All four were allegedly linked to terrorists.
The encounter was carried out allegedly by a team led by deputy inspector general of police DG Vanjara, who was later jailed for his alleged involvement in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case.
The police then alleged that Ishrat and her associates were Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operatives involved in a plot to assassinate Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi.
Later, an investigation was launched into the allegations that Ishrat was killed in a fake encounter.
After a long investigation, an Ahmedabad metropolitan court in 2009 ruled that the encounter was staged.
The decision was challenged by the Gujarat state government and the case went to the high court.
On July 3, 2013, the CBI filed its first chargesheet in an Ahmedabad court saying that the shooting was a staged encounter carried out in cold blood.
In June 2013, IB chief Asif Ibrahim told the office of the Prime Minister and home minister of India that the IB had enough evidence to prove that Ishrat was part of an LeT module, which planned to kill Modi and LK Advani.
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