Gujarat cops responsible for fake encounter: Ishrat Jehan's kin

Family members of city girl Ishrat Jehan, who was killed in a fake encounter in Gujarat in 2004 along with three others, today demanded capital punishment for the accused policemen and sought explanation from Chief Minister Narendra Modi over the issue.

The Gujarat High Court-appointed SIT concluded that the controversial police encounter with Ishrat and three others was fake as they were killed prior to the incident.

"We had full faith in the judiciary. Now it has been proved that it was a fake encounter in which my daughter was killed," Ishrat's mother Shamima Kausar Jehan, a resident of Mumbra in neighbouring Thane district, told PTI, hours after the SIT's findings became public.

"Can Modi give back my daughter," she asked.

Ishrat's brother Raza Anwar Iqbal said capital punishment should be awarded to the policemen involved in the fake encounter. "They (the accused policemen) should be hanged. Also, those who ordered the fake encounter should not be allowed to go (scot-free)."

"Modi should answer why my sister was killed," Iqbal said.

Ishrat, a 19-year-old college girl, along with Javed Sheikh alias Pranesh Pillai, Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar, was killed in a shootout by Ahmedabad Crime Branch on June 15, 2004.

Crime Branch had then claimed the four were LeT members and were on a mission to kill Modi.