CBI court relaxes Ishrat case accused N K Amin's bail condition

Pic Courtesy: PTI

Ahmedabad: A special CBI court on Thursday allowed a petition by former police officer N K Amin, an accused in the Ishrat Jahan alleged fake encounter case, to exempt him from weekly appearance before the court as a bail condition.

Special judge J K Pandya exempted Amin to mark his presence before the court every Thursday, which was one of the conditions that the court had imposed on him while granting bail in May 2015.

The court, however, asked him to remain present during the trial.

Seeking exemption from weekly appearance, Amin had argued before the court that there was no complaint against him regarding intimidation or influencing of witnesses or any such thing that could hamper the investigation.

The court had granted him bail in May 2015 on medical grounds as he was suffering from prostate cancer. Other co-accused IPS officers D G Vanzara and P P Pandey were granted bail in February that year.

Amin had served eight years in jail following his arrest in August 2007.

He had recently decided to step down as an officer of Gujarat Police to which he was reinstated by the state government after getting bail.

He had resigned from his post along with co-accused Tarun Barot on a petition challenging their reinstatement.

Amin had also faced trial in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case but was discharged last year by a special CBI court in Mumbai.

He was the DySP in the special branch when the encounter took place on June 15, 2004 on the outskirts of the city in which 19-year-old Ishrat Jahan, her friend Pranesh Pillai alias Javed Sheikh and two suspected Pakistani persons Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar were gunned down by the city crime branch officials.

The crime branch had then claimed that those four were Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operatives and had landed in Gujarat to kill the then chief minister Narendra Modi.

According to CBI's charge-sheet in 2012, it was a fake encounter orchestrated jointly by Gujarat Police and Intelligence Bureau.

As many as seven Gujarat police personnel were named in the CBI charge sheet including IPS officers G L Singhal, P P Pandey, D G Vanzara, N K Amin, Tarun Barot, Anaju Chaudhari and J G Parmar for murder, criminal conspiracy and confinement of the four persons.

Singhal, Barot, Chaudhari and Parmar secured default bail as the probe agency could not file charge sheet against them within the stipulated time period of 90 days after their arrest.

According to the charge sheet, Amin had fired five bullets at Ishrat and three others.