Apology demanded from Centre for filing affidavit against Ishrat Jahan

By TwoCircles.net Staff Reporter,

New Delhi: Eminent human rights activist and Member of the National Integration Council Shabnam Hashmi today wrote to Prme Minister Dr Manmohan Singh urging him to ask the Union Ministry of Home Affairs to tender an apology for filing affidavit against Mumbai college girl Ishrat Jahan who was killed in a fake encounter in Gujarat in June 2004.

In an open letter to the PM, Hashmi said: “My request to you is that if your government has any political will then please ask your home ministry to tender a public apology for filing the affidavit against the innocent girl who was so brutally murdered. It requires some courage and conviction.”

“The affidavit filed by the Home Ministry is a proof of the fact that in Ishrat Jahan’s fake encounter case UPA has connived with the Gujarat government in a blatantly communal manner”, Shabnam wrote in the letter.

Ishrat Jahan was killed with three others in Ahmedabad. A magisterial probe yesterday concluded that the encounter was staged by Gujarat top police officers to secure promotions.

The Ministry of Home Affairs in an affidavit to the Gujarat High Court stated that Ishrat, Javed and two others Jisan Johar and Amjad Ali Rana were all operatives of Pakistan-based terror group Lashkar-e-Toiba. The Union government had also said that no proposal for CBI investigation was under consideration of the Centre nor did it consider the present case fit for CBI probe.

The family of 19-year-old Ishrat Jahan had approached the High Court demanding CBI probe in the case. They continued saying their girl was innocent and was killed in fake encounter.

Shabnam has also questioned the reason behind filing of the affidavit by the Central Government. “It seems it was to dissuade the Court from appointing a strong SIT and give a message that even the Central Government had approved the act of fake encounter. But for the magisterial enquiry the Central Home Ministry had left no stone unturned to prove that Ishrat deserved to be killed,” she wrote in the letter.

Ahmedabad metropolitan magistrate, S.P. Tamang, in his 252-page, hand-written report ruled that the June 2004 killing of Ishrat Jahan and three others was a case of “fake encounter.” Tamang has named the then “encounter specialist” of the Gujarat police, D.G. Vanzara, among others, accused in the “cold-blooded murder” of the teenaged girl and the three others. Vanzara is already in jail for the Sohrabuddin fake encounter.