Sharpshooter Khan mulls suing Union minister Maneka Gandhi

Sharpshooter Shafath Ali Khan Wednesday said he was mulling to sue Union minister Maneka Gandhi for allegedly levelling defamatory and wild charges against him over the killing of tigress Avni in Maharashtra last week.

Khan said his son Asgar Ali and his four-member team were issued an authorisation letter by the Maharashtra forest department to carry out the operation and the tigress was shot at in "self-defence" while they were trying to tranquilise it.

The tigress, officially known as T1, was believed to have killed 13 people in the last two years.

It was killed on November 2 by Ali in Maharashtra's Yavatmal district as part of an operation. The big cat has left behind two 10-month-old cubs.

Gandhi, in a series of tweets Sunday, had lashed out at the Maharashtra government for giving the orders to kill the tigress, despite opposition from several stakeholders.

The Union women and child development minister had also slammed Maharashtra Forest Minister Sudhir Mungantiwar for hiring private marksmen Khan and his son to carry out hunting operations in the state, including the killing of Avni.

However, Mungantiwar had also claimed that Khan, who Gandhi had termed a "criminal", was tasked with shooting a tiger in her Pilibhit Lok Sabha constituency in Uttar Pradesh in 2009 (Gandhi's son Varun Gandhi represented the constituency then).

Khan told PTI, "We are taking legal opinion on that, because she (Gandhi) has made some serious and baseless allegations personally on me and my family.

"It is shocking that a lady of the rank of a cabinet minister can talk in such a way without verifying the facts...in the next couple of days, we will decide on the line of action we are going to take."