Ahmedabad:
A Central Bureau of Investigation or CBI court in Ahmedabad today sent senior Gujarat IPS officer PP Pande to CBI custody till August 21 in the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case. The CBI had sought his 14-day remand earlier this week.
Pande surrendered in a CBI court on Tuesday after his anticipatory bail plea was dismissed by the Supreme Court. "You were an absconder earlier also. Your conduct makes you dis-entitled to anticipatory bail," the Supreme Court had said on Monday, ending the last legal hope for the 1982 batch police officer who has been evading the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for several months.
Mr Pande is the senior-most serving Gujarat police officer to be charged and arrested in the 2004 fake encounter case. He was the Joint Commissioner of Crime in Ahmedabad when Ishrat was killed along with her friend Javed Shaikh alias Pranesh Pillai, and two other persons, Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar, on the outskirts of Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004.
The senior officer, who had been largely missing since the CBI last month named him as one of the seven Gujarat policemen allegedly involved in the encounter, made a couple of dramatic appearances in the court, first on a stretcher and then in a wheelchair.
The Gujarat Police had claimed the four killed in 2004 were terrorists on a mission to kill Chief Minister Narendra Modi, whose government is yet to act against Mr Pande, even after he was declared an absconder, leading to speculation that the Additional Director General-rank officer was being protected by the state authorities.