Ahmedabad:
The Gujarat High Court today pulled up the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for a delay in filing a chargesheet in the Ishrat Jahan encounter case.
The court has now given till the second week of July for the CBI to file a chargesheet in the case.
The case has been making headlines this week over the CBI's probe into the alleged role of a senior officer of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) in the encounter of Ishrat, a 19-year-old Mumbai girl, who the Gujarat Police, on the basis of intel inputs, claims was a terrorist who had plans to assassinate Gujarat Chief Minister
Narendra Modi. The officer, though, reportedly told the agency that the intel alert was genuine to the best of his knowledge, and that he was not involved in the encounter.
(Read)Taking a strong observation of the recent developments, an angry court said "It seems that in past one month you were more interested in figuring out whether the killed persons were terrorists or not but the court is not concerned whether they were terrorists or normal human beings. In any case they should not have been liquidated," It also asked the CBI to shift focus on ascertaining whether it was a fake encounter or not rather than probe the genuineness of the IB alert.
The CBI, on the instruction of the High Court, had taken over the probe of the alleged fake encounter in which 19-year-old Ishrat, Javed Sheikh alias Pranesh Pillai, Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar were killed on the outskirts of Ahmedebad on June 15, 2004 allegedly by a Crime Branch team.