Justice (retd) Muzaffar Jan who headed the judicial probe into the rape and murder of two women in Shopian, today created a sensation by saying that the parts of his report which were derogatory to the victims of the crime were not his.

Justice Jan said that the controversial sections were part of a separate report prepared by the police investigation team working with him, which had somehow got mixed with his own report.

He said he was horrified to find the police report had slipped into the commission’s official report. “I don’t know how it happened. Maybe CDs distributed among mediapersons have clubbed them mistakenly,” Justice Jan told The Indian Express. “I don’t know”.

The head of the police investigation team, Senior Superintendent of Police Dr Haseeb Mughal, however, rejected Justice Jan’s claim. Only one report had been prepared, he said.

“The police investigation team which was working with Justice Jan forms a part of the commission and is not a separate entity. There cannot be two reports and then a mix up,” SSP Mughal said.

The Indian Express had reported on Saturday how Justice Jan’s report — accepted by Jammu and Kashmir Finance and Law Minister Abdul Rahim Rather on Friday — raised more qestions than it answered: the needle of suspicion in the report swung wildly from the “role” of police and security personnel to the victim Neelofar Jan’s “estranged brother”, her husband’s “loose character”, a “rift” in the family, to even the two victims’ behaviour and the “possibility” of one of them “developing some relation with others”.

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