Ishrat Jehan was killed in an encounter in 2004. (File Photo)
Highlights
- BJP: Congress must apologise for distorting facts in Ishrat Jahan case
- BJP: Congress hid Ishrat Jahan's terror links to defame Narendra Modi
- BJP: Congress government changed affidavit in court during Ishrat trial
The Congress must apologise for distorting the facts about college student Ishrat Jehan to defame Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP said today. In a Mumbai court yesterday, David Coleman Headley testified that like him, Ishrat Jehan was a member of the terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is based in Pakistan and attacked Mumbai in 2008, killing 166 people.
The Prime Minister's party says that Mr Headley has exposed how the Congress, when in power, tried to suppress the information about Ishrat Jehan's terror links in an overdrive to implicate Mr Modi, then the Chief Minister of Gujarat, for allowing fake encounters in which the state police killed Muslims, including Ishrat Jehan, in cold blood. Several senior police officers accused of murdering her have said that Ishrat Jehan was part of a terror cell that was planning to assassinate Mr Modi.
When Ishrat Jahan was shot along with three men in 2004 in Gujarat, she was 19 years old.
The Congress must apologise for how it handled the Ishrat Jehan case, Nirmala Sitharaman said.
The BJP points out that in 2009, the national government led by the Congress, offered completely contradictory information in court on Ishrat Jahan, who lived near Mumbai and was found dead in Gujarat. First, the government said that she was a terrorist; just two months later, it said she wasn't.
The Congress must apologize for changing its affidavit, said BJP leader and union minister Nirmala Sitharamam to reporters today.
David Headley was arrested in the US in 2009. The Pakistani-American, who filmed the Mumbai landmarks that were attacked in 2008 by the Lashkar, was interrogated by members of India's National Investigation Agency or NIA in 2010 in the US; to them, he listed Ishrat Jehan as a Lashkar operative.
The BJP has repeatedly said that Ishrat Jehan's terrorist links are unquestionable; her family has denied this; activists say that whether or not she was a terrorist, the fact that she was killed in an extrajudicial killing cannot be overlooked.
A former top intel officer, Rajinder Kumar, told NDTV yesterday that some of the "highest and most powerful in the country" conspired to name him as the mastermind of Ishrat Jehan's murder in an effort to "neutralise a political challenge" (read Mr Modi). Mr Kumar was chief of the Intelligence Bureau in Gujarat when the student was killed. Backed by his agency, he has maintained that there was credible information about Ishrat Jehan's terror links, and that though he passed on the tip to the police, he neither authorized nor was informed of the shooting.