India

Chidambaram doctored Ishrat Jahan affidavit files allege BJP

Another ex-bureaucrat claims cover up in Ishrat Jahan case, says he was forced to sign affidavit

Close on the heels of former Home Secretary G K Pillai casting aspersions on the role of the then Home Minister P Chidambaram regarding his decision to file a second affidavit in the Ishrat Jahan case, another bureaucrat has now spoken up saying he was forced and tortured by senior government officials to sign the second affidavit.

In fresh revelations, the former senior bureaucrat R V S Mani, who served as Under Secretary (Internal Security) in the Union Home ministry, has claimed that he was hounded, harassed and forced to sign on an affidavit that claimed that there was no proof that Ishrat Jahan and the four other people, who were killed in an alleged fake encounter, were terrorists. This affidavit, Mani claimed in an interview to Times Now, was not written by him and neither was he aware of its contents.

Former bureaucrat RVS Mani is the man who signed the two affidavits in the Ishrat case. He has claimed that he was used as a rubber stamp by the government. His comments echo the claims of former Home Secretary G K Pillai who said last week that ex-Home Minister Chidambaram had changed the affidavit which clearly described Ishrat and her slain aides as LeT operatives.

The ruling BJP today alleged that P Chidambaram as Home Minister rewrote an affidavit submitted to a court on the Ishrat Jehan case on orders from the Congress leadership, which, the party alleged, wanted to frame Narendra Modi. “The government is not closed to the option of a judicial probe in the entire episode,” Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told reporters this evening.

The first affidavit on August 6, 2009, said Ishrat, 19, was a “woman activist of the Lashkar-e-Taiba” and the encounter was “not a fit case for a CBI probe.” The affidavit quoted Intelligence Bureau inputs, media reports and an apology by a Lashkar mouthpiece as proof of Ishrat’s terror links.A revised affidavit on September 29 said “media reports do not constitute intelligence inputs and intelligence inputs do not constitute conclusive proof.” It also stated that the central government would have “no objection” to a CBI investigation into the 2004 encounter. The home ministry official who drafted both the affidavits – RVS Mani – has alleged that he was “tortured” and pressured by the CBI to name the intelligence officers responsible for inputs on Ishrat’s alleged terror links.

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