Ishrat case: Court adjourns hearing as CBI seeks time to reply

A special CBI court today adjourned the hearing in the Ishrat Jahan alleged fake encounter case till April 27 as the probe agency sought time to respond to the discharge applications filed by former Gujarat police officers N K Amin and D G Vanzara.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) sought some time from the court to file its response on their discharge pleas and special CBI judge J K Pandya gave two weeks time to it and adjourned the hearing till then.

Both Amin and Vanzara had filed their discharge applications last month.

Amin is one of the seven police officials whom the CBI had named in its first charge sheet in the case. Of them, the special court had recently discharged former in-charge DGP P P Pandey.

Amin had filed the discharge plea on multiple grounds and claimed that the process of law was not followed by the CBI in making certain accused persons as witnesses in the case.

He had alleged that the charge sheet was "fabricated" and most of the facts cited therein were "tampered with".

Amin had also said that the validity of the charge sheet was decided upon by the same court, which heard the discharge application of Pandey, who was recently discharged by the same court.

Amin, who retired in August 2016, was given an extension by the state government. He was, however, forced to resign on the direction of the Supreme Court after a petition was filed challenging his as well as co-accused Tarun Barot's re-induction into the force.

In his plea, Vanzara had claimed that "the entire material on record of this case is nothing but a false story".

In his discharge application, Vanzara had said that the statements of the witnesses recorded by the CBI are "highly suspicious" and there is no prima facie prosecutable evidence to prove conspiracy.

Ishrat, a 19-year-old college girl from Mumbra near Mumbai, her friend Javed Sheikh alias Pranesh, Amzad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar were killed in an alleged fake encounter by the Ahmedabad police on the outskirts of the city in June 2004.

The police had then claimed that they were terrorists affiliated to the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba.

The first charge sheet filed by the CBI had named seven Gujarat policemen -- Amin, Barot, Pandey, Vanzara, J G Parmar, K M Vaghela, and G L Singhal, for carrying out a fake encounter. While Pandey was discharged, six others are out on bail.