Last month, David Headley had told a Mumbai court that Ishrat Jahan was a member of the Lashkar's women's wing.
Highlights
- NIA didn't pressure me to say Ishrat Jehan was a terrorist: David Headley
- Headley had said the 19-year-old student was a Lashkar terrorist
- She was shot dead in 2004 over alleged plot to assassinate then CM Modi
Terrorist
David Coleman Headley told a Mumbai court today that Indian investigators who met him in the US after he was arrested in 2009 did not pressure him to state that
Ishrat Jahan, a college student killed by Gujarat's top cops, was a terrorist.
The government has accused the Congress of blatantly misleading courts and the public about Ishrat Jahan when it was in power by trying to suppress the fact that she was a member of terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is based in Pakistan. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's party, the BJP, says that by
attempting to conceal this crucial information, the previous Congress-led government wanted to embarrass Mr Modi, who was Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time, by suggesting that his administration colluded with the police to eliminate Ishrat because she was a Muslim.
Ishrat Jahan was 19 when she was killed on a highway near Ahmedabad along with three men in 2004. The top officers of the Gujarat police said that they had been informed by the Intelligence Bureau that the group was planning to assassinate Mr Modi. The Intelligence Bureau says that it did share this information, but at no point sanctioned or participated in the shooting.
Headley, 55, is testifying in a terror case via video-conference from an undisclosed location in the US, where he has been given 35 years in jail for his role in the Mumbai terror attacks of 2008 in which 166 people were killed. Last month, he told the Mumbai court that he witnessed a conversation between Lashkar operatives who claimed
Ishrat Jahan was a member of the group. He also said that he was later informed that she had been killed in an encounter near Ahmedabad.
This disclosure ignited a re-examination of why the Congress, when it was in power, first filed a court document that said
Ishrat Jahan was linked to the Lashkar, only to revise it months later with no reference to that allegation.
Human rights activists and the opposition say that whether or not Ishrat Jahan was a terrorist, it's how she was killed in cold blood that must be accounted for.