SC asks Guj HC to hear plea for SIT to probe Ishrat killing

The Supreme Court asked the Gujarat High Court to consider and pass appropriate order for constituting a separate Special Investigation Team (SIT) for probing the case relating to killing of Ishrat Jahan in an encounter.

A bench comprising Justices B Sudershan Reddy and S S Nijjar also asked the High Court to consider the application filed by apex court-appointed SIT, headed by former CBI director R K Raghvan, expressing inability to probe the case. The bench issued notice to Ishrat Jahan's mother Shamina Kausar on the petition filed by the Gujarat government seeking that the probe of the case be entrusted to the SIT, recently constituted by the state government.

The Gujarat government has also challenged the partial acceptance of Tamang Committee report of September 7, 2009 which had held the encounter as "fake" and sought prosecution of the officers responsible for it. Mumbai-based Ishrat, was killed in an encounter along with Javed Ghulam Sheikh alias Pranesh Kumar Pillai, Amjad Ali alias Rajkumar Akbar Ali Rana and Jisan Johar Abdul Gani by crime branch officials near Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004.

The Gujarat Police at the time of encounter had claimed that Ishrat and three others were Lashkar-e-Tayiba operatives on a mission to kill Chief Minister Narendra Modi. It had also claimed that the encounter was carried out based on specific inputs from the Central Intelligence that Lashkar-e-Taiba was planning to carry out attacks on various parts of the country.

The apex court had earlier stayed all further proceedings in Gujarat High Court relating to the killings after Ishrat's mother approached it challenging the stay granted by the single judge.