On 25 September, an FIR was registered in the Ishrat Jahan case against the disappearance of documents crucial to the case.
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In its FIR filed at Parliament Police station, home ministry has listed five documents have been missing from the North Block, including the Ishrat affidavit, amended by former home minister P Chidambaram. A one-man committee was set up to trace the missing documents is learnt to have made no recommendations for punitive action against anyone.
The Ishrat Jahan case pertains to Ahmedabad police shooting down four people – including Ishrat Jahan – on June 15, 2004, on accusation that they were members of the terrorist organisation Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT). Though home ministry officials realised in 2013 that the five documents were missing, their disappearance was never made it into a major issue as “fair copies were intact”, says PTI. “We are probing the matter”, he said.
The then under secretary MHA filed the first affidavit on behalf of Union of India in Gujarat High Court on August 6, 2009. The then additional secretary was appointed as the inquiry official.
Sources said in his statement to the Ishrat inquiry panel, retired IAS officer Deverakonda Diptivilasa had reportedly said the documents were part of the file which he sent to the seniors during the deliberations before the second affidavit related to the alleged fake encounter case was filed. In 2016, the ministry examined all the files at length and found that some documents were missing.
As per finding of the report how, why and under what circumstances these papers were missing or were removed from the files, was a matter of investigation.
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The missing documents issue acquired salience a year ago when the BJP and senior Modi government ministers sought to dilute the significance of the Ishrat Jahan murder case on the plea what Ishrat was a terrorist.
