Ishrat Jahan encounter killing

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On 15 June 2004, officers of the Ahmedabad Police Crime Branch and members of the Subsidiary Intelligence Bureau (SIB) of Ahmedabad shot and killed four people. Those killed in the incident were Ishrat Jahan Raza, a 19-year-old woman from Mumbra, Maharashtra, and three men – Javed Ghulam Sheikh (born Pranesh Pillai), Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar.^[1] The Indian Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) made allegations about the entire operation being an instance of "encounter killing".^[2] The state agencies and police claimed that Ishrat Jahan and her associates were Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operatives involved in a plot to assassinate the Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi.

After the incident, an investigation was launched based on allegations that the description of the incident by the police was false and the killings were deliberate and unlawful. The police team involved in the incident had been led by DIG D.G. Vanjara, an officer who spent eight years in jail for his alleged involvement in the extra-judicial killing of another person, Sohrabuddin Sheikh.^[3] Five years later, in 2009, an Ahmedabad Metropolitan court ruled that the encounter was staged.^[4] The decision was challenged by the state government and taken to the Gujarat High Court. After further investigation, in 2011, a Special Investigation Team (SIT) told the High Court that the encounter was not genuine, and the victims were killed prior to the date of the staged encounter.^[5][6] On 3 July 2013, the CBI filed its first chargesheet in an Ahmedabad court saying that the shooting was a staged encounter carried out in cold blood.^[7]

Although the question of whether the killings were an illegal staged event or not is separate from whether the people who were killed were working for the LeT, the family of Ishrat Jahan and several politicians and activists have maintained that she was innocent, and that question has continued to be disputed.^[8] The CBI declared that the encounter was staged, but did not comment on whether Ishrat Jahan was an LeT associate or not.^[9] In 2004, the Lahore-based publication Ghazwa Times quoted someone from Jamaat-ud-Dawah, the political arm of the LeT, as saying that Ishrat and her companions were LeT "activists".^[10] However, in 2007, Jamaat-ud-Dawa retracted the statement as a "journalistic mistake" and offered an apology to Ishrat's family. No explanation was given as to why the previous statement was retracted after three years.^[11] 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 (NIA).^[12] However, the NIA called these reports "baseless",^[13] and the CBI said that this assertion was fabricated by the IPS officer Rajendra Kumar, who is one of the suspects in the case.^[14] In June 2013, the Intelligence Bureau chief Asif Ibrahim told the Office of the Prime Minister and the 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 the former Deputy Prime Minister of India, Lal Krishna Advani.^[15] In February 2016, Headley testified before a Mumbai court, via video from the US, that Ishrat Jahan was a member of Laskhar-e-Taiba.^[16][17]