Ishrat encounter not faked, will challenge report in court: Gujarat

Ahmedabad: Rejecting a magisterial report which concluded that the state police faked the 2004 encounter in which Mumbra girl Ishrat Jahan and three others were killed, the Gujarat government on Tuesday said it would challenge the report in a higher court. After the four were gunned down, the Gujarat police had claimed that they were on a Lashkar-e-Toiba mission to kill chief minister Narendra Modi.

Releasing metropolitan magistrate S P Tamang’s report to the media on Monday, advocate Mukul Sinha, who has been appearing for Ishrat’s mother Shamima in the Gujarat High Court, said the magistrate found that the encounter was faked by the police officers eager for promotions and the appreciation of chief minister Modi.

While the BJP on Tuesday said that Modi could not be held responsible for everything that happens in the state, Union law minister Veerappa Moily raised the pitch, saying Modi would have been in “some other place” if the Ishrat Jahan encounter had taken place in any other country.

Moily told reporters that Modi could be headed for big trouble as “there are many such cases which are coming up now... if more investigations are conducted, more skeletons may tumble”. He said revelations in the Ishrat Jahan encounter was a “very serious matter for the country and... any other foreign country, Narendra Modi would have been in some other place”.

The CPM Politburo, in a statement, demanded the resignation of Modi and said “the targeted killings of persons belonging to the minority community by the state police reveals the state of affairs under the Narendra Modi government.”