Aryan Grover
The CBI court has allowed the discharge applications of three senior police officials, IPS officer G.L. Singhal, retired director general of police Tarun A. Borat and State Reserve Police Force commando Anaju Chaudhari. Commenting on the possibility of the encounter being fake, the CBI court, trying the case said that, “there is no question of any fake encounter”, and discharged the three officials.
In an encounter that happened in 2004, the police officers were facing charges of murder, criminal conspiracy, abduction and illegal detention of a 19-year old girl from Mumbra, Ishrat Jahan, and her companions Javed Shaikh alias Pranesh Pillai, Zeeshan Johar and Amjad Ali Rana.
Following the encounter, the Guharat Police had claimed that Ishrat and three others were Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives whose mission was the assassination of the erstwhile chief minister of the state, Narendra Modi. However, a CBI investigation conducted into this matter suggested that the encounter was fake, following which, a case was registered against 7 police officials in 2013, namely- P.P. Pandey, D.G. Vanzara, N.K. Amin, J.G. Parmar, besides Singhal, Barot and Chaudhary.
These officers had charges made out against them under sections 120B (criminal conspiracy) read with Sections 341 (wrongful restraint), 342 (wrongful confinement), 343 (wrongful confinement for 3 or more days), 365 (kidnapping or abducting to secretly and wrongfully confine someone) and 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code, along with provisions of the Indian Arms Act.