Ishrat Jahan Saga Continues: Delhi Police Investigating Missing Documents
Following an FIR lodged by Union Home Ministry, the Delhi Police has started examining the case of missing files related to the Ishrat Jahan shootout case. The FIR was filed by a Home Ministry under-secretary at the Parliament Street Police Station, under Section 409 of the Indian Penal Code.
On 25 September, New Delhi Deputy Commissioner of Police Jatin Narwal stated:
We have filed an FIR in the Ishrat Jahan missing documents case and are planning further proceedings.
According to sources in the Home Ministry, the missing
papers listed in the FIR were the office copies of the letter and enclosure
sent by the then home secretary to the attorney general on 18 September, 2009,
along with a copy of another letter and the draft of a further affidavit as
vetted by the attorney general.
The government had assembled an official panel to probe the missing documents after former home secretary G K Pillai created controversy by claiming that the then home minister P Chidambaram altered certain papers related to an affidavit in the case.
Pillai claimed in an interview to NDTV a few months ago:
<i>Chidambaram called a lower functionary in the Intelligence Bureau and totally rewrote the affidavit. The draft was dictated by him so no one else could say anything. He shouldn’t say that the Intelligence Bureau and the Home Secretary were on board.</i>
Chidambaram and his party, the Indian National Congress, as a
counter charged the Narendra Modi government with politicising the issue. But
it will not be that easy for the former home minister to wriggle out of this
mess. To quote R
Jagannathan:
<i>…all aspects of the Ishrat Jahan case happened after the UPA came to power: the encounter in June 2004, the two affidavits in 2009, the disclosures made by David Coleman Headley, and the charge-sheeting of a former Intelligence Bureau (IB) officer for complicity in the “fake encounter”. In other words, if there was a fake encounter in June 2004, the IB acted as if it had the tacit confidence of the UPA’s home ministry. The IB has always been a political animal, and any case with political impact it is unlikely to have acted without political concurrence. This implies that the decision to look more closely at the IB’s role in the fake encounter was an after-thought...</i>
The Home Ministry requested the panel to submit a “detailed
and final report” as the issue is a very sensitive one.
With inputs from IANS.