Senior Intelligence Bureau officer Rajendra Kumar may challenge any possible move by CBI to name him in its charge sheet in the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case.
Official sources said the Home Ministry is understood to have advised Kumar, a special director in the IB, to challenge the possibility on the issue of not obtaining prior sanction from the Home Ministry to take action against him.
Sources said though Kumar may not be named in the first charge sheet to be filed by CBI on July 4, his name may come up in the next phase which will deal with the larger conspiracy of carrying out the fake encounter in which Ishrat and three others were killed in Gujarat nine years ago.
Kumar may ask the court to make the Home Ministry a party in his plea.
The sources said the Home Ministry was convinced that the CBI does not have enough evidence to prosecute Kumar in the alleged fake encounter case and it was unlikely to give sanction to CBI to prosecute the senior IPS officer.
However, the CBI has not sought the sanction from the Home Ministry, which is the cadre controlling authority of IPS officers.
The case pertains to killing of four people including 19-year-old Ishrat from Mumbra and the allegation is that the four were in detention of Gujarat Police before they were killed in a stage-managed encounter in 2004.
CBI was entrusted with the investigations of the case by the Gujarat High Court and the agency managed to get one of the accused as an approver in the case, who named Kumar, a 1979 batch IPS officer posted as Joint Director of
Intelligence Bureau in Ahmedabad at that time.
———–PTI