Eleven Gujarat policemen, including mid-level officers, who were named as accused in the FIR filed by CBI in the Ishrat Jahan encounter case but not chargesheeted, have been made witnesses by the probe agency.
The central agency filed a charge sheet in the 2004 encounter in a special court here on July 3. In the document, CBI has said Ishrat Jahan, a teenager from Mumbai, and three others were killed by Gujarat police in a "fake" encounter.
The policemen who were not chargesheeted but named as witnesses in the case are Vakhatsinh Vanaar, Hareshkumar Agrawat, Chetan Goswami, Pravinsinh Vaghela, Ramesh Patel, Kishorsinh Vaghela, Devendragiri Goswami, Ibrahim Chauhan, Mohan Menat, Kalu Desai and Bharat Patel (all ranked between Constable and DySP).
Retired police officer Devendragiri Goswami, whose statement has been recorded under Section 164 of CrPC (making it admissible in court as evidence), has also been named as a witness in the high-profile case in which seven police officers, some of them IPS, are in the dock.
Witness-policemen who have recorded their statements include Goswami, Menat, Chauhan, Desai, Hareshkumar Agrawat and Kishorsinh Vaghela.
Bharat Patel, Ramesh Patel, Pravinsinh and Vanaar are on the list of witnesses but there is no word on whether their statements have been recorded or not.
Former Gujarat DGP K R Kaushik, who was Ahmedabad Police Commissioner in 2004, has not been chargesheeted though he was named as an accused in the FIR. Others policemen who have not been chargesheeted but are named as accused are Mohan Kalaswa (now dead) and Bhala Bharwad.
The encounter had taken place on the outskirts of Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004. The police had then said the four -- Ishrat, Javed Sheikh, Zeeshan Johar, Amjad Ali Rana -- were LeT terrorists who had come to assassinate Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
