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Malegaon:
In an open letter
dated today National Integration Council Member Shabnam Hashmi urged
the Prme Minister to ask the Home Ministry to tender an apology for
filing affidavit against Ishrat Jahan.
"My request to you
is that if your government has any political will then please ask
your home ministry to tender a public apology for filing the
affidavit against the innocent girl who was so brutally murdered. It
requires some courage and conviction", Shabnam said in her letter to
the Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh today.
"The affidavit
filed by the Home Ministry is a proof of the fact that in Ishrat
Jahan’s fake encounter case UPA has connived with the Gujarat
government in a blatantly communal manne", Shabnam wrote in her
letter to the PM.
Ishrat Jahan was
killed with three other in what turned out to be a fake police
encounter in June 2004.
Stating that they realized last month through the
media reports that the Ministry of Home Affairs in an affidavit
stated that Ishrat, Javed and two others Jisan Johar and Amjad Ali
Rana were all operatives of Pakistan-based terror group
Lashkar-e-Toiba, Shabnam claimed that the Union government told the
high court, "No proposal for CBI investigation is under
consideration of the Centre nor does it consider the present case
fit for CBI probe."
"Moreover", Shabnam writes, "The Centre claimed that there is no
question of independent inquiry, as an additional DGP (CID &
Intelligence) had carried out an independent probe into the incident
and the officer is neither working with crime branch nor is he a
subordinate to the crime branch, which carried out the operation and
later investigated the case itself."
Questioning the
reason behind filing of the Affidavit by the Central Government, she
wrote, "It seems it was to dissuade the Court from appointing a
strong S I T and give a message that even the Central Government had
approved the act of fake encounter. But for the magisterial enquiry
the Central Home Ministry had left no stone unturned to prove that
Ishrat deserved to be killed."
Stating that
whenever action against the errant officers is sought the logic used
always is what will happen to the morale of the officers, Shabnam
asked, "What happens to the morale of the officers
when they torture innocent young people, when they kill them, when
they illegally detain them, beat them. What happens to their morale
then? Do they just go home and sleep?"
Shabnam came out
with the open letter to the Prime Minister after the Ahmedabad metropolitan
magistrate, S.P. Tamang, ruled that the June 2004 killing of Ishrat Jahan and three others was a case of “fake encounter.”
In his 252-page, hand-written
report, Tamang has named the then “encounter specialist” of the
Gujarat police, D.G. Vanzara, among others, accused in the
“cold-blooded murder” of the teenaged girl and the three others.
Tamang said Ishrat Jahan was well-educated and came from a good
family. “She conducted tuitions and worked hard to support her
family. Despite being a good citizen, she was declared a terrorist
and killed in an encounter,” the report stated.
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