Ishrat encounter case: SIT submits report to Gujarat High Court

The Special Investigation Team probing the alleged police encounter killing of Mumbai teenager Ishrat Jahan and three others in 2004 today submitted its progress report to the Gujarat High Court, officials said.

The report was submitted following directions from a division bench of Justice Jayant Patel and Justice Abhilasha Kumari which during the last hearing on September 10 had asked the three-member panel, headed by IPS officer RR Verma, to submit its final report by today.

The next hearing in the matter is slated for Friday.

"We have submitted our progress report in the case to the high court," an official associated with the SIT said here.

During the September 10 hearing, the high court had given about a month's time to SIT to complete investigations and submit the final report determining whether the encounter was fake or genuine.

IPS officers Mohan Jha and Satish Verma are the two other member of the team.

Ishrat (19), Javed Sheikh alias Pranesh Pillai, Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar were allegedly killed in a police encounter here on June 15, 2004.

Ahmedabad Crime Branch had then claimed the deceased were members of LeT who had come to kill Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

The probe in the case is being supervised directly by the high court, which constituted the SIT last year to investigate genuineness of the encounter after petitions were filed by Ishrat's mother Shamima Kausar and Gopinath Pillai, father of Pranesh, in this regard.