As the Gujarat police today began excavating the grounds near the Illol house of arrested DIG D G Vanjhara to look for the remains of Kausar Bi, wife of fake encounter victim Sohrabuddin Sheikh, another skeleton has tumbled out of the Vanjhara closet — an internal report of the police, first submitted by the state CID (Crime) in 2003 but not acted upon though it was seconded by the IGP (Human Rights and Social Justice) two years later, questioned Vanjhara’s account of the killing in “self-defence” of a city youth Samirkhan Sarfarazkhan Pathan while in police custody in October, 2002.

As a SP-rank officer, Vanjhara was heading Ahmedabad’s Detection of Crime Branch (DCB) when Pathan was killed on the night of October 22, 2002. The DCB claimed that Pathan was a Jaish-e-Mohammad operative who had been held from the central bus stand in Ahmedabad’s Geeta Mandir area on September 27, 2002 while “on a mission to eliminate Chief Minister Narendra Modi”. When Pathan was held, he was unarmed.

According to the DCB, Pathan was taken to a garden where he had killed a constable in 1996. The DCB claimed that they wanted to “recreate” the scene of the constable’s murder. But Pathan, the DCB claimed, snatched one of the Inspector’s revolver and fired a round. He died when policemen escorting him opened fire in “self-defence”, the DCB maintained.

As per police records, the DCB itself opened an inquiry into Pathan’s killing. Chittaranjan Singh, who was then holding charge as Ahmedabad police commissioner, wrote to then DGP K Chakravarthy, listing 10 points of reference for an inquiry into the incident which raised doubts about the circumstances in which Pathan died. But a subsequent inquiry by the Human Rights and Social Justice cell of the DGP’s office found that this letter had been replaced by another with fewer points of reference.

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