Ishrat Jahan case: A shootout and many smoking guns

With the CBI making its first arrests in the Ishrat Jahan case, Ujjwala Nayudu and Rahul Tripathi look at past investigations, all of which have punctured holes in the Gujarat Police's encounter theory

When were Ishrat Jahan and three others killed? Was it in a police encounter on June 15, 2004, as the Gujarat Police's records show, or a day earlier, on the evening of June 14, as subsequent investigations by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and others show, and which now point to an encounter that may have been staged? Nine years after the alleged encounter, heads have begun to roll in the Gujarat Police with the CBI making arrests, including that of IPS officer Girish Singhal, late last month.

On June 15, 2004, the Gujarat Police announced that it had "eliminated the first woman fidayeen". Ishrat, the most visible face of the tragedy, was barely 19 when she was shot dead. Police said they had found an identity card on her that identified her as Ishrat Jahan Raza, a science student of Guru Nanak Khalsa College in Mumbai.

According to the Gujarat Police, Ishrat and her "accomplices", Javed Sheikh alias Pranesh Pillai and alleged Pakistanis Amjad Ali Rana and Jishan Johar, were Lashkar-e-Toiba operatives out to assassinate Chief Minister Narendra Modi. Police killed Ishrat and the others in the 'encounter' and claimed to have foiled the assassination bid. Their bodies, riddled with AK-56 bullets, lay on the road beside a blue Indica car on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. The police claimed to have acted on an intelligence input that Javed was coming with two fidayeens in a blue Indica—MH02 J A 4786—to kill Modi.

After the encounter, Pandey and Vanzara proudly claimed to have busted a high-profile, "genuine" terror plot. "Genuine", because questions were being raised on two earlier encounters—that of Samir Khan Pathan (2002) and Sadiq Jamal Mehtar (2003).

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