Manas Dasgupta
Ahmedabad, May 2
Two retired police officers of Gujarat, DG Vanzara and Narendra Amin, were today discharged from the 14-year-old Ishrat Jahan encounter case by a special CBI court here.
Vanzara, former state inspector general of police, and Amin, former district superintendent of police, had filed the discharge applications soon after former state director general of police PP Pandey was discharged from the case in February last year on the ground that the state government had not given sanction for prosecution against the officer.
In case of Vanzara and Amin also, special CBI judge JK Pandya said since the government had not sanctioned their prosecution, their discharge pleas were allowed and proceedings against them would be dropped in the case.
Under Section 197 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the government’s sanction is necessary for the prosecution of a public servant for an act done as part of the official duty.
The court agreed with the contention of the applicants that they had acted as per the demand of the situation and the action was “in line with their duties” as the police officers. The court also agreed that the situation could have been even worse if the alleged terrorists were not encountered by the Gujarat Police then.
Mumbai college girl Ishrat, 19, along with three others — Javed Sheikh alias Pranesh Pillai, and two Pakistani nationals Zeeshan Johar and Amjad Ali Rana — were killed in the encounter near Kotarpur on the outskirts of Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004.
The police then had claimed that the four were connected with the Pakistan-based terror group Lashkar-e-Toiba and were on a mission to kill the then Chief Minister Narendra Modi to avenge the killings of minorities in the 2002 communal riots in the state.
Vanzara, the then chief of the anti-terrorist squad, was arrested in 2009 on “murder” charge after a magisterial inquiry ordered by the High Court held the Ishrat Jahan encounter as a “fake” case and had claimed that the four were in the custody of the Gujarat Police for two days before they were killed.
Soon afterwards, Amin and several other police officers were also arrested, while Pandey, then chief of the intelligence wing, was the last in the line of about a dozen police officers picked up in connection with the case.
‘Situation could've been worse’
- The special CBI court agreed with the contention of the applicants, DG Vanzara and Narendra Amin, that they had acted as per the demand of the situation and the action was 'in line with their duties’ as the police officers
- The court also agreed that the situation could have been even worse if the alleged terrorists were not encountered by the Gujarat Police then
from The Tribune http://bit.ly/2WtKSwI
via Today’s News Headlines
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