Ishrat Jahan case

Who is Ishrat Jahan case?

The Ishrat Jahan encounter case is an ongoing criminal case in the Gujarat state of India, took place on 15 June 2004, and involved encounter killings of Ishrat Jahan Raza, a 19-year old girl from Mumbai, and three men: Pranesh Pillai, Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar who were alleged links to terrorists, by officers of the Ahmedabad Police Crime Branch.

The encounter was carried out allegedly by a team led by DIG D.G. Vanjara, who was later jailed for his alleged involvement in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter. The police alleged that Ishrat and her associates were Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives involved in a plot to assassinate the Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi. Later, an investigation was launched into the allegations that Ishrat was killed in a fake encounter. After a long investigation, in 2009, an Ahmedabad Metropolitan court ruled that the encounter was staged. The decision was challenged by the Gujarat State government, and taken to the High Court. On 3 July 2013, the CBI has filed its first chargesheet in an Ahmadabad court saying that the shooting was a staged encounter carried out in cold blood.

Ishrat's family as well as several politicians and activists maintain that she was innocent. CBI declared the encounter as staged, but did not comment on whether Ishrat Jahan was an LeT associate or not. In 2004, a Lahore-based publication affiliated with LeT claimed that Ishrat and her companions were operatives, but in 2007, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the political wing of the LeT retracted the statement as a "journalistic mistake", offering apology to Ishrat's family. In 2010, some media outlets reported that the convicted terrorist David Headley had implicated Ishrat in terrorist activities in a statement given to the National Investigation Agency. However, the NIA called these reports as "baseless", and the CBI suspects that this input was fabricated by the IPS officer Rajendra Kumar, who is a suspect in the fake encounter case. After further investigation, in 2011, a Special Investigation Team told the Gujarat High Court that the encounter was not genuine, and the victims were killed prior to the date of the staged encounter. In June 2013, the Intelligence Bureau chief Asif Ibrahim told the office of Prime Minister and Home Minister of India that the Bureau had enough evidence to prove that Ishrat was a part of an LeT module which planned to kill Narendra Modi and Lal Krishna Advani.