Centre must reveal Ishrat Jahan’s terror links
The Congress-led UPA regime must put out in the public domain facts about Ishrat Jahan's terror links and end the ongoing speculation and malicious propaganda that continues to float around. In the early hours of June 15, 2004, the 19-year-old from Mumbai was killed along with four others, by Gujarat Police on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in what was allegedly a fake encounter. Nine years later, two key questions continue to dog the case: First, was Ishrat Jahan a terrorist; and second, was she killed in a fake encounterIJ While facts in the second matter are being investigated, both the Government and the probing agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation, are uptight on her terrorist links.
This is strange because the Government has a body of material which points to her complicity. For example, the Intelligence Bureau has told the CBI that, in 2004, it already had information of Ishrat Jahan's connections to the Pakistan-based terror outfit, lashkar-e-Tayyeba, and the IB's Gujarat station had shared this information with Gujarat Police, prior to the encounter. Add to this, the IB warning sent out to all States in April 2004 against attacks on top Hindu nationalist leaders, and the pieces seem to fit. Then in 2007, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs in its affidavit filed with the Gujarat High Court clearly said that Ishrat Jahan was recruited by Javed Sheikh (one of the men killed in the 2004 encounter) who was known to work for the leT. It also pointed out that after the encounter, Ishrat Jahan was hailed as a martyr on the leT's website and its newspaper. The terror organisation later apologised for the posting but the MHA, in its affidavit said it was only a “tactical ploy”. In 2009, the Home Ministry revised the affidavit slightly to distance itself from the encounter but it still did not change anything related to intelligence available on Ishrat Jahan's terror links.
And, if all this was not enough, in June 2010, the National Investigation Agency interrogated David Coleman Headley, and the Pakistan-born Chicago-resident, who had been arrested by US authorities for his role in the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, gave clinching evidence of Ishrat Jahan's leT links. According to the NIA's report, Headley said that when in late 2005 Zaki-ur-Rehman lakhvi introduced him to (Yusuf) Muzzammil, he had sarcastically added that the lashkar commander's “every big project had ended in failure” and that included the “Ishrat Jahan module”. Apart from the NIA report, the FBI had also separately communicated to the IB that Headley had mentioned a “female suicide bomber”.
Yet, in 2011, the NIA and the CBI did a volte-face — in May, the former told the Gujarat High Court that media reports of Ishrat Jahan's terror links were baseless while the latter said in its First Information Report filed in December that it had no evidence of her leT ties. Most recently, in its charge-sheet, the CBI maintains a studied silence on her terrorist background. If, as CBI Director Ranjit Sinha has said, the agency is prepared to look into the possibility of a ‘political conspiracy’ behind Ishrat Jahan’s killing — indication of its desire to implicate Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and his colleagues — what stops it from admitting that it has material to link the killed woman to terrorIJ
