Ahmedabad, Sep 8 (Inditop.com) The Gujarat government Tuesday said it would challenge the report of a metropolitan magistrate that the 2004 gunbattle that killed Mumbai collegian Ishrat Jahan and three of her friends was faked by police officials who shot them in cold blood.
A day after the report by Ahmedabad metropolitan magistrate S.P. Tamang, state government spokesperson and cabinet minister Jay Narayan Vyas told reporters that the inquiry report was “bad in law and so the state government will challenge it”.
He said this was because the sections of the criminal procedure code used in the inquiry were not tenable with the case.
Vyas wondered how could the magistrate proceed with an inquiry in the case when there was already a high-level police investigation ordered by the Gujarat High Court on the very day — Aug 13, 2009, — that had been given time till Nov 30 this year.
On June 15, 2004, Ishrat from Mumbra in Thane district and three of her friends, Javed Ghulam Sheikh alias Pranesh Kumar Pillai, Amjad Ali alias Rajkumar Akbar Ali Rana and Jisan Johar Abdul Gani, were gunned down by Ahmedabad Police’s Crime Branch (Detection) on the outskirts of the city.
Police claimed that the four were members of a Lashkar-e-Taiba module and were on a mission to kill Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
The metropolitan magistrate’s inquiry report says there was no gunbattle between the four youngsters and the police. The report, released to the media by lawyer Mukul Sinha, says the four people were kidnapped from Mumbai June 12, 2004, and killed in cold blood two days later.
