Ishrat inquiry panel to examine officers second time

New Delhi

The panel of B K Prasad, Additional Secretary in the Home Ministry, will call a few officers, including RVS Mani, former Under Secretary, who was in-charge of Ishrat case affidavits.

"After examination of over a dozen officers, several new facts have come to light. To corroborate these new information, questioning of a few officers again became necessary," sources privy to the development said.

The panel has already recorded the statements of retired IAS officer Deverakonda Diptivilasa and serving IAS officers Dharmendra Sharma and Rakesh Singh and serving IPS officer M A Ganapathy.

All the four officers were handling the key Internal Security-I division in the Home Ministry as Joint Secretary in different periods.

While Diptivilasa is currently serving as non-official Director of public sector Corporation Bank, Sharma is at present with Delhi government. Singh is serving in Karnataka government. Ganapathy is now Director General of Uttarakhand Police.

Sources said the four officers explained their respective position and reportedly pleaded their ignorance about the missing documents related to the Ishrat Jahan case.

A number of Director, Deputy Secretary and Under Secretary rank officers were also examined by the panel.

The inquiry panel has so far not been able to trace the missing files related to alleged fake encounter killing of Ishrat Jahan.

The one-member panel was constituted after Home Minister Rajnath Singh had disclosed in Parliament on March 10 that the files were missing.

Following an uproar in Parliament, the ministry had asked Prasad to inquire into the circumstances in which the files related to the case of Ishrat Jahan, who was killed in an alleged fake encounter in Gujarat in 2004, went missing.

The papers, which disappeared from the Home Ministry, include the copy of an affidavit vetted by the then Attorney General and submitted in the Gujarat High Court in 2009 and the draft of the second affidavit vetted by the AG on which changes were made.

Two letters written by the then Home Secretary G K Pillai to the then Attorney General late G E Vahanvati and the copy of the draft affidavit have also so far remained untraceable.