SIT rebuts Zakia point by point
The Supreme Court-appointed special investigation team (SIT), which has given a clean chit to Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi in the Gulberg Society massacre case, has gone into great details to give a point by point rebuttal, in its 20,000-page report, to the allegation levelled by complainant Zakia Jafri.
Sources involved with the SIT’s investigations and the subsequent formulation of the report revealed that the SIT has divided its report primarily into three sections: details of investigations into Zakia Jafri’s allegations, technical investigations of call data records of senior police and state government officials and finally the allegations made by IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt.
For instance, Zakia Jafri in her complaint, raised four major points: firstly, the charred bodies of karsevaks were deliberately brought to Ahmedabad by Mr Modi to trigger communal violence and subsequently take political mileage out of it, secondly, Mr Modi was involved in the conspiracy to trigger the communal riots, thirdly, neither the chief minister nor senior police officers took any effective or concreter steps to control violence and last, Ehsan Jafri, the former Congress MP killed in Gulberg Society, called up Mr Modi and Ahmedabad police commissioner P.C. Pandey but they did not help.
Sources said the SIT has given an elaborate clarification for all these allegations. Details of the SIT’s report available with this newspaper reveals that according to the SIT’ investigations the bodies of Kar Sewaks were deliberately kept at the Sola Civil Hospital, as it is on the outskirts of Ahmedabad and away from minority-dominated areas, to avoid any communal tension. But the charred bodies had to be brought to Ahmedabad as there was no facility to preserve DNA of the victims at Godhra.
Then, the SIT clarifies, that there was no safe place, like a proper mortuary, to keep the bodies at Godhra so these had to be brought to the state capital. Further, since only four of the 56 victims could be identified during the post-mortem at Godhra, the bodies had to be brought to Ahmedabad since most of the victims were from the capital and had families there. The SIT in its report has also stated that past track record reveals that Godhra is much more communally sensitive as compared to Ahmedabad. “Had the bodies remained at Godhra itself perhaps the magnitude of communal backlash would have been much more severe,” the report states. Then on the issue of Ehsan Jafri having called up Mr Modi and other senior police officers, the report clarifies that Mr Jafri had called two close associates. But apart from these two calls no other record of Jafri’s landline number was available.
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