By Muslim Mirror News,
Ahmedabad, July 1: In a big setback to the absconding IPS officer wanted by CBI for his alleged involvement in the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case, the Gujarat High Court on Monday rejected the plea of Pruthvi Pal Pande for quashing the FIR by CBI against him. The CBI is going to file charge sheet in the case on 4th July but hasn’t been able to arrest Pande. A CBI court on 21st June has already declared him absconder.
According to CBI FIR, Mr Pande provided so-called crucial intelligence inputs to fellow officers which said that Ishrat, a college student, and three others were Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operatives and were on a mission to assassinate Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. Mr Pande, as the Joint Commissioner of Police, Ahmedabad, was heading the crime branch when Ishrat, Javed Shaikh alias Pranesh Pillai, Amjadali Akbarali Rana and Zeeshan Johar were killed in a fake encounter by the Gujarat Police on the city outskirts on June 15, 2004.
Mr Pande is a 1982-batch IPS officer.
“We want the CBI to catch him as soon as possible. The court had proclaimed him an absconder and a proclaimed absconder had no rights to move the court,” Mukul Sinha, the lawyer for Javed Sheikh has been quoted as saying.