Ahmedabad: A special CBI court here on Wednesday discharged three police officers in the 2004 Ishrat Jahan case and observed that there was no question of any fake encounter on their part and that there is nothing on record, even prima facie, to show that the four deceased in the case were not terrorists.
The court of special judge V R Raval made the observation while discharging police officers G L Singhal, Tarun Barot (now retired) and Anaju Chaudhary in the Ishrat Jahan case. The fourth applicant, J G Parmar, had died during the course of hearing.
They were the last accused in the case against whom charges of murder, abduction, and criminal conspiracy were dropped by the court after the Gujarat government declined prosecution sanction against them as sought by the CBI on the order of the same court.
Out of the total seven accused against whom the CBI had filed a charge sheet in 2013, three other police officers- P P Pandey, D G Vanzara and N K Amin- had been discharged in 2018 and 2019.
“Being high rank police officers, it was their bounden duty to take necessary steps in order to maintain law and order. There is no question of any fake encounter on the part of any such police officer. All the police officers were to be more cautious and alert to maintain peace in the public at large,” the court said in its order.
It said that the information received by the police officers regarding the four victims “was correct, sound, and there was substantial force in the information”.
“There is nothing on record, even prima facie, to suggest that the victims were not terrorists…the IB inputs were not genuine,” the court observed.
It further said that the four offenders were “not simple and ordinary”.
