Ahmedabad: A special CBI court on Tuesday rejected the bail plea of suspended IPS officer NK Amin in the 2004 Ishrat Jahan encounter case. Suspended Deputy Superintendent of Police (DySP) Amin's lawyer Ruturaj Nanavati had claimed earlier that the CBI chargesheet filed earlier this week was incomplete which entitled Amin to apply for bail.
The CBI, however, had argued that it had filed a complete chargesheet in the case. In his application, Amin had claimed the CBI, which is probing the encounter, failed to file a chargesheet against him within the stipulated 90 days of his arrest and the document filed on July 3 by the central agency was "incomplete".
"CBI's chargesheet is defective and incomplete as it does not conform to rules prescribed under Section 173(5) of the Code of Criminal Procedure. Non-compliance of rules on the part of the CBI allows Amin right to seek benefit of default bail under Section 167(2)," said Nanavati. He had also cited another provision in the Section 167(2) of CrPC under which an accused is entitled to seek bail if the investigating agency does not provide relevant documents and other evidence on the basis of which he has been named in the chargesheet within a stipulated time.
CBI had argued that it has filed a complete chargesheet before the court and submitted all the documents which are pending verification. However, Nanavati told the court of Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate HS Khutwad that the agency had sought time for submitting the additional documents.
The CBI had arrested Amin on April 4 this year after his release on bail in an another encounter case of Sohrabuddin Shaikh. Earlier, five policemen-accused in the case - GL Singhal, Tarun Barot, J G Parmar, Bharat Patel and Anaju Chaudhary - were granted bail as the CBI failed to file chargesheet within 90 days of their arrest.
As per the chargesheet, Amin, along with Barot, another DySP, abducted Ishrat Jahan, a Mumbai-based teenager, and her associate Javed Shaik, alias Pranesh Pillai, from a toll booth in Anand district two days prior to their killing on June 15, 2004 near Ahmedabad. He is also accused of firing shots at Ishrat, Javed and two alleged Pakistani nationals Zeeshan Johar and Amjad Ali Rana. All four were killed allegedly by Ahmedabad Crime Branch in what the CBI claimed was a staged shootout.
(With additional information from PTI)
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