The Gujarat high court Thursday transferred the Ishrat Jahan encounter killing investigation from the state police to the Supreme Court-appointed SIT.
A division bench of Justices Jayant Patel and Justice Abhilasha Kumari, rejecting the demand for a CBI inquiry, said the SIT headed by former CBI director R.K. Raghavan w
ould take over the probe. The court passed this order on a petition filed by Shamina Kauser, Ishrat Jahan’s mother, and Gopinath Pillai, father of Javed Ghulam Sheikh alias Pranesh Kumar Pillai, also killed in the same encou-nter. They had sought a CBI probe into the encounter killings by the Ahmedabad police in June 2004, claiming that these had been staged.
Ishrat was killed in an encounter along with Javed Ghulam Sheikh and two others on June 15, 2004 by an Ahmedabad crime branch team headed by DCP D.G. Vanjara, now in jail as the prime accused in the Sohrabuddin and Tulsiram Prajapati fake encounters.