Zakia Jafri gets 25,000 page SIT report on Guj riots

The Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team report on the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat was today handed over to Zakia Jafri, wife of slain Congress MP Ehsaan Jafri.

Ehsaan Jafri was among 69 people burnt alive by a rioting mob on 28 February, 2002 at the Gulbarg Housing Society in Ahmedabad.

The report which the team submitted runs into 25,000 pages, and multiple volumes, CNN-IBN reported. Jafri has also been asked by the court to file a plea before it if any discrepancies were found in the report.

“We will check the report and then let you know what our future course of action will be,” Jafri told reporters outside the court.

Social activist Teesta Setalvad said that they would file their say before the court in July.

“We have supplied the SIT report three days ahead of the in 10 May deadline to give it. After checking, Zakia has to file her stand that she has received the report and say if any deficiency is there in it,” RS Jamwar, legal counsel for the SIT, told reporters outside the court.

Jafri had accused over 50 people including Chief Minister Narendra Modi of being involved in the post-Godhra riots. She had alleged that her husband Congress MP Ehsaan Jafri was brutally burnt alive outside his house in the Gulbarg Housing Society when he tried to plead for the lives of women and children being killed in the society complex in February 2002.

However, the SIT said it had not found any evidence of the involvement of Chief Minister Modi in the Gulbarg massacre case.

The SIT submitted its final findings on Jafri’s plea to the court of Metropolitan Magistrate M S Bhatt in February, in a sealed cover, and said it was up to the court to decide whether the main petitioner should get a copy. But it said it had reservations on sharing the report with a co-petitioner Teesta Setalvad.

The court had then refused to share a copy of the report saying the SIT had not submitted additional documents pertaining to the investigation and that without those available it would be premature to issue the report. It gave the SIT time till 15 March to furnish all documents. After the submission of the documents by the SIT team, Jafri approached the court for a copy again.

The investigators then argued that a copy should be given only after the magistrate studied the whole report and arrived at his own conclusion on whether he accepted or rejected the SIT’s findings. The magistrate subsequently ruled that Jafri should be given a copy of the report.