Ishrat case accused officer reinstated by Gujarat government

NK Amin, who is an accused in the 2004 Ishrat Jahan case and the 2005 Soharabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case, has been reinstated by the Gujarat Home Department as Deputy Superintendent of Police (DySP) in the State Crime Records Bureau (SCRB) at Gandhinagar, officials said in Ahmedabad on Friday. 

"Amin's suspension has been revoked and he has been appointed in the SCRB as DySP today," a senior Home Department official said. Amin was granted regular bail by the Special CBI Court on May 8 on the grounds of his worsening health and parity with other co-accused. The Special CBI court allowed Amin's bail application on medical grounds since he suffers from prostate cancer and also on the basis of parity with co-accused IPS officers D G Vanzara and P P Pandey, who were granted bail in February.

Amin, who is also an accused in the 2005 Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case, was granted bail by a Special Mumbai court in the case, in March 2013. Earlier, Pandey was reinstated by the Gujarat state government as Additional Director General of Police (ADGP), Law and Order, after he was granted regular bail.

Amin was the DySP in the Special branch, when the alleged encounter took place on June 15, 2004, on the outskirts of the city. In the encounter, a Mumbra-based 19-year-old college girl Ishrat Jahan, her friend Pranesh Pillai alias Javed Sheikh along with two suspected Pakistanis Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar were gunned down by city crime branch officials. The crime branch had then claimed that the four of them were Lashkar-E Taiyaba (LeT) operatives who had reached Gujarat to kill the then Chief Minister Narendra Modi.