Amit Shah, My Alibi, Needed In Court: Maya Kodnani, Gujarat Riots Convict

Ahmedabad: Maya Kodnani, a former minister in Gujarat sentenced to jail for a leading role in the 2002 communal riots, wants BJP chief Amit Shah to be summoned to court to help establish that she was not at the scene of two deadly eruptions of violence.

A court in Gujarat will hear her request on the 21st of this month.

"It's a sub judice matter and we don't want to comment on the matter,"' said BJP spokesman Bharat Pandya.

In 2012, Ms Kodnani, a gynaecologist, was sentenced to 28 years in jail for her role in the Naroda Patiya massacre, the single bloodiest episode of the three-day riots. In July 2014, she was granted bail.

Her lawyer Amit Patel told NDTV, "We have moved the application so that there are credible witnesses to support our claim that my client was not at the spot and had been falsely implicated."

Naroda Patiya is 10 kilometres from the main city of Ahmedabad; nearly 100 Muslims were killed here. Ms Kodnani has also been accused of murder in the riots that took place the same day, on February 28, 2002, next door in Naroda Gram where 11 Muslims died.

Ms Kodnani was not a minister at the time of the riots, but from 2007 to 2009, she served as Gujarat's minister for women and child development and is the highest-profile figure to be convicted in connection with the riots. Witnesses told the court that she handed out swords to rioters, exhorted them to attack Muslims and at one point fired a pistol.

Ms Kodnani says that Mr Shah - who was an elected MLA at the time of the riots and 13 others listed by her can prove that at the time of the killings that she is accused of, she was at the Gujarat assembly and then at Sola Civil Hospital, the nursing home she ran in Ahmedabad.

Her request made a month ago in court says that she accompanied Mr Shah and others to the hospital to see the bodies of the nearly 60 Hindu activists who had been burnt to death by a Muslim mob on the Sabarmati Express.

With inputs from agencies