Ahmedabad:
A Gujarat court is expected to decide today whether to give a copy of the Special Investigation Team's (SIT) final report on the petition of Zakia Jafri in a 2002 Gujarat riots case to her. If the court agrees to give Ms Jafri a copy, the SIT report will finally become public. Ms Jafri has accused Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and others of being conspirators in the Gujarat riots. Sources say the final report finds no prosecutable evidence against Mr Modi, though the SIT has rubbished all conjecture on a document not yet in the public domain.
Ms Jafri is a petitioner in one of the nine 2002 Gujarat-riots-related cases that the Supreme Court asked the SIT it had appointed to investigate - the Gulberg Society massacre. The case relates to the killing by a riotous mob of 69 people, among them her husband and former Congress MP Ehsaan Jafri, on February 28, 2002 at the Gulberg Housing Society in Ahmedabad where the Jafris lived. Ms Jafri has pleaded that Mr Modi and several senior minister and officials did nothing to prevent the killings.
She alleges that when the mob attacked the housing complex, her husband made frantic calls to the police and even to the Chief Minister's office for help but to no avail. For many years now Mrs Jafri has taken her legal battle against Chief Minister Modi and 61 other senior government functionaries from court to court.
The SIT submitted its final findings on Ms Jafri's plea to the court of Metropolitan Magistrate M S Bhatt in February, in sealed cover, and said it was up to the court to decide whether the main petitioner should get a copy. But it said it had reservations on sharing the report with a co-petitioner Teesta Setalvad.
The court had then refused to share a copy saying the SIT had not submitted additional documents pertaining to the investigation and that without those available it would be premature to issue the report. It gave the SIT till March 15 to furnish all documents - the SIT team did that and Mrs Jafri approached the court again for a copy. The investigators then had argued that a copy should be given only after the magistrate studied the whole report and arrived at his own conclusion on whether he accepted or rejected the SIT's findings.
Mr Modi faces accusations of conspiracy not just from Ms Jafri, but also from two senior police officers of that time. One, Sanjiv Bhatt, has claimed before court that he was part of two crucial law and order meetings in which the Chief Minister ordered the police to go slow on rioters when communal rioting began after 59 passengers, mostly kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya, were killed in the Godhra train burning incident of February 28, 2002. A former Gujarat Director General of Police RB Sreekumar too reportedly made such a claim before an inquiry commission. Over a 1000 Muslims were killed across Gujarat in the post-Godhra communal riots.
Many complaints were registered, a number of them made it to trial. In some, witnesses turned hostile amid allegations that they were threatened or offered inducements. Two big cases were shifted out of Gujarat - the Best Bakery Case, in which a mob had sealed off a Muslim bakery in Baroda and burnt all the people inside alive, and the Bilkis Bano case, in which a young pregnant woman was gangraped and left for dead, but not before several family members were killed in front of her. In both cases, the main accused have been brought to book.
In two more cases tried in Gujarat, 33 rioters have been given life imprisonment in the Sardarpura case and 23 people have been convicted yesterday and now await sentencing in the Ode massacre case. Both cases had rioting mobs kill many people who had taken refuge in buildings.
There are five other cases now that await conclusion, including the Gulberg and Naroda massacres.