Ishrat case: Court rejects arrest warrant against accused cop

A special CBI court today rejected the application of CBI seeking arrest warrant of Additional Director of Police, CID (crime), P P Pande in the 2004 Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case.
The judge, however, issued transfer warrant for another accused D G Vanzara, who is behind bars in Sohrabuddin Shaikh and Tulsi Prajapati fake encounter cases.
DySP and investigation officer Kalaimani today submitted an application for arrest warrant for Pande, claiming that he was evading summons for interrogation.
Special judge S H Khutwad rejected it on the ground that the accused was not yet declared an 'absconder', and he was a serving police officer.

Pande, a 1980-batch IPS officer of Gujarat cadre, was joint police commissioner in Ahmedabad when Ishrat Jahan, Javed Shaikh alias Pranesh Pillai, Amjadali Akbarali Rana and Zeeshan Johar were killed in an encounter on June 15, 2004.
Gujarat police had claimed that they were terrorists who had arrived in the city to assassinate Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

On February 21, 2013, the CBI court had refused to issue arrest warrant for another accused inspector Bharat Patel, who was later arrested by the central probe agency.
But the judge accepted the CBI's application on Vanzara, who is also an accused in the Ishrat Jahan case. As the Sohrabuddin Sheikh case has been shifted to a Mumbai court, Vanzara along with the other accused was taken there.

CBI now wants Vanzara's custody in the Ishrat case. It has so far arrested six Gujarat police officers in this case -- IPS officer G L Singhal, Tarun Barot, N K Amin, J G Parmar, Bharat Patel and Anaju Chaudhary.