Gujarat cops shot Ishrat in cold blood: Magistrate

In another setback to the Gujarat government, a local magistrate has ruled that Ishrat Raza Jahan and three others were killed in cold blood by the Gujarat police on the outskirts of Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004.

The metropolitan magistrate, SP Tamang, conducted an enquiry into the killings under section 176 of the criminal procedure code (CrPC) which lays down that encounters and custodial deaths are entitled to a judicial probe. The magistrate has held that the fake encounter was organised by policemen from the crime branch. The policemen involved had connived with each other and committed the murders to get ‘name, fame and promotion and praise’ from the chief minister.

Soon after the magistrate submitted the report, Mukul Sinha, lawyer of Ishrat and Javed Shaikh’s kin in the case, demanded that all police officers who were members of the encounter team be arrested immediately. “A police complaint should be filed against all the policemen and they should be arrested,” Sinha said during a media briefing. “The metropolitan magistrate has concluded in his report that the encounter was fake, and that there was no provocation.” The crime branch police had made the same claims in the Ishrat Jahan case as they had done in connection with the fake encounter in which Sohrabuddin and his wife, Kausarbi, were murdered.

According to the magistrate’s report, Javed Shaikh and Ishrat were brought from Mumbai on June 12, 2004, by policemen of the crime branch in a blue Indica car. The report, which runs into over 243 pages, says there was no mention of a female terrorist in the tip-off the police had received.

Yet the police had detained her along with Javed Shaikh in the afternoon of June 12, 2004. The report further says that if Ishrat had not been killed, she could have revealed the police conspiracy.