‘Top cop Pandey,now on run,plotted Ishrat encounter with IB man’

Incidentally,D G Vanzara,the once-feared encounter specialist now jailed in connection with the Sohrabuddin Sheikh and Tulsiram Prajapati encounter cases,was DCP (crime) in Ahmedabad police in 2004. He was said to be close to Pandey,who is an accused in the Sadiq Jamal encounter case also.

CBI believes Pandey “conspired” with some officials of the Intelligence Bureau who “passed” to him an input that Ishrat and three others were Lashkar-e-Tayabba operatives out on a mission to kill Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

“The Ishrat encounter was planned by top officers of the Ahmedabad crime branch following an intelligence input from IB,which was received by the then Ahmedabad police commissioner K R Kaushik,who shared it with Pandey. Pandey,in turn,shared the input with his trusted aide D G Vanzara,” a CBI officer said.

The input is said to have been passed by Rajinder Kumar,an IB official then posted in Gujarat.

The CBI official said Vanzara had formed two teams under G L Singhal and N K Amin (both police officers now in CBI custody) to carry out the encounter killing of Ishrat and three others and Pandey had supervised the “logistics” and “communication” with Singhal’s help.

According to CBI’s chargesheet in the 2003 Sadiq Jamal killing case,Pandey had hired the private vehicle used in the encounter.

Encounter killings apart,Pandey’s role in the probe into some of the most infamous massacres during the 2002 communal riots is also under the scanner. The police officer had supervised the probe into the Naroda Patiya,Naroda Gam and Gulberg Society massacres,which were then with the crime branch.

Deputy Inspector General of Police Rahul Sharma has told a special court that he had collected call records of some top politicians,bureaucrats and police officers as part of investigations into these cases from telecom companies,while assisting the crime branch.

The original CDs containing the call records,Sharma stated,were handed over to Pandey,from where they allegedly went missing.

After moving out of the crime branch,Pandey also served as chief of CID (intelligence) from 2009 to 11.