Ahmedabad, April 20: The Supreme Court on Monday set aside a Gujarat high court order directing an inquiry against judicial magistrate SP Tamang who had held that teenager Ishrat Jahan and three other alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operatives were killed in a fake encounter by the state police.
A bench of justices B Sudershan Reddy and SS Nijjar asked the chief justice of the Gujarat high court to constitute a division bench on the petitions filed by the deceased’s kin, seeking a CBI inquiry. It also asked the bench to hear Gujarat government’s application challenging the judicial magistrate’s findings.
Gujarat government had claimed Ishrat and the three others were LeT operatives on a mission to kill chief minister Narendra Modi.
However, it faced a huge embarrassment after a judicial magistrate on September 7, 2009, had held the encounter as fake and sought prosecution of the officers responsible for the killing.
Within two days of the magistrate’s findings, a single judge of the high court, on an application by the government, stayed the magistrate’s order on the ground that he had exceeded his jurisdiction and also passed adverse remarks against the magistrate. He also ordered an inquiry by the high court registrar on the conduct of the judicial magistrate. Aggrieved by the HC order, Ishrat’s mother Shamima Kauser and a relative of another victim, appealed in the apex court.
Mumbai-based Ishrat, 19, was killed in an encounter along with Javed Ghulam Sheikh alias Pranesh Kumar Pillai, Amjad Ali alias Rajkumar Akbar Ali Rana and Jisan Johar Abdul Gani by crime branch officials near Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004.
“The probe team already constituted by HC shall not deal with the report of the learned magistrate in any manner whatsoever. However, the observations made in the impugned order with regard to the report of the learned magistrate are set aside, which are totally unnecessary. The observations so made, if allowed to remain, may result in far-reaching consequences,” the apex court said.
“We fail to appreciate what made the judge make such observations even while the very application filed by the state is kept pending for its adjudication.” The apex court also expressed reservations over the manner in which the single judge dealt with the application filed by Gujarat government.
—With agency inputs