NEW DELHI: The home ministry has asked the one-man panel probing how some papers went missing from the file pertaining to Ishrat Jahan case affidavits, to expedite its work and submit its report at the earliest.Union home secretary Rajiv Mehrishi is reported to have directed additional secretary in the home ministry BK Prasad, who heads the panel, to speed up the process of examining various levels of officers who had handled the file, to pinpoint when and how the four crucial papers in the Ishrat file had disappeared.Early findings of the probe would help the government field likely queries from MPs during the upcoming Parliament session starting Monday. Prasad is due for retirement on May 31 and the home ministry is keen on the probe being concluded before he demits office.Top home ministry officials believe the Ishrat papers - that include office copy of the letters and enclosures sent by then home secretary G K Pillai to the attorney general on September 18, 2009 and September 23, 2009; draft affidavit vetted by the attorney general as well as the draft affidavit further amended by then home minister P Chidambaram - were possibly misplaced and can be found if a concerted effort is made.The panel, constituted on March 14 following an uproar in Parliament, was asked to inquire into the circumstances in which the files related to the case of Ishrat Jahan went missing and fix responsibility for the same.As part of the probe so far, Prasad has drafted and is sending out different set of questionnaires to officers based on their level of seniority. Among the queries put to officers below the secretary-level are the point of time when they discovered that the documents had gone missing; how this particular anomaly was noticed; whether they brought the issue of 'missing' documents to the notice of their senior; and if they are aware of contents of the 'missing' documents that were mentioned in the notesheet, which summarises the content of the file, but were no longer part of the file.Prasad's methodology is to reportedly first get the replies of under-secretaries, the lowest in the chain of officers, before questioning the senior officers. Separate questionnaires have been prepared for director, joint secretary, additional secretary and the secretary-level bureaucrats.Before the panel was set up, home ministry representatives had spoken to former officers of internal security division of the ministry, including Dipti Vilas who was joint secretary when the Ishrat affidavit was revised, to trace when exactly these documents went missing. However, they could not arrive at any conclusion.In fact, none of the officers seemed to recall having seen the said papers.