Ishrat Jahan

New Delhi: The five crucial files related to Ishrat Jahan encounter case went missing in September 2009 when P Chidambaram was the Home Minister, the one-man inquiry panel has said in its report.

The panel, headed by additional secretary BK Prasad concluded that some papers were removed ‘knowingly or unknowingly or misplaced’ between September 18-28, 2009.

Only one paper out of the five documents related to the alleged Ishrat fake encounter case that went missing from the Ministry was found, the 52-page report said.

During the probe, Prasad examined 11 officials who handled Ishrat Jahan case files. One of the joint secretaries, who was examined by the committee, disclosed that when the file reached him the documents were missing.

“It is evident that the documents were removed knowingly or unknowingly, or misplaced,” the inquiry committee has concluded.

The inquiry panel, however, made no reference to Chidambaram or anyone in the then UPA government.

The papers which went missing, from the hard disk of a computer of the MHA, include the office copy of the letter and enclosure sent by the then Home Secretary G K Pillai to the Attorney General on September 18, 2009. This was the only file which the panel managed to retrieve from a computer.

The clue about the letter was received by the inquiry committee after examination of three former Joint Secretaries handling the sensitive Internal Security Division in the Home Ministry. These officers were retired IAS officer Deverakonda Diptivilasa and serving IAS officers Dharmendra Sharma and Rakesh Singh, sources said.

The papers also include the copy of an affidavit vetted by the then Attorney General and submitted in the Gujarat High Court in 2009 and the draft of the second affidavit vetted by the AG on which changes were made.

Ishrat Jahan and others were killed in an encounter with Gujarat police on the outskirts of Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004. The Gujarat police had claimed that those killed in the encounters were LeT operatives and had planned to assassinate the then CM Narendra Modi.

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