Mumbai, July 06: The family of Ishrat Jahan, who was killed along with three alleged terrorists in 2004 in an encounter, yesterday repudiated media reports attributed to LeT operative David Headley that she was a ‘fidayeen’ and sought clarity on the issue from Home Minister P Chidambaram.
“I believe that my daughter was innocent and that she could never have done this. We always teach our children to love our country and this report is incorrect,” her mother Shamima Kausar told reporters.
According to reports quoting unnamed officials, Headley has claimed before an NIA team in the US that Ishrat, a resident of Mumbai, was recruited by top LeT Commander Muzammil who was in charge of the outfit’s operations in India till 2007.
The unnamed official further said that Headley shared this information with the four-member team comprising officials from National Investigation Agency and Law Department during their visit to Chicago in the US.
Interestingly the same report quoting the unnamed source said, Headley’s reconnaissance missions for Lashkar in India started in 2006 while Ishrat Jahan was killed along with Javed Sheikh alias Pranesh Pillai and two Pakistani nationals — Amjad Ali and Jishan Johar Abdul Ghani — on June 15, 2004.
Following the killing, Ishrat’s mother Shamima Kausar in her petition to Gujarat High Court had claimed that her daughter was working as a saleswoman for Sheikh’s perfumes business.
Later, the Ahmedabad metropolitan magistrate, S.P. Tamang ruled that the June 2004 killing of Ishrat Jahan and three others was a case of “fake encounter.”
In his 252-page, hand-written report, Tamang has named the then “encounter specialist” of the Gujarat police, D.G. Vanzara, among others, accused in the “cold-blooded murder” of the teenaged girl and the three others.
–Agencies–