Godhra 2002 case: Gujarat SIT trashes FIR filed by Zakia

Ahmedabad: The Special Investigation Team (SIT) today strongly contested the protest petition filed by Zakia Jafri against its closure report giving clean chit to Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and others in the 2002 post-Godhra riot case. The day-to-day hearing on the petition filed by Zakia earlier this month, began in the court of Metropolitan Magistrate B J Ganatra today. [caption id=“attachment_726445” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Zakia Jaffri is the widow of slain Congress MP Ehsan Jaffri. IBNLive. [/caption] In a three-point rebuttal, the SIT, represented by its counsel R S Jamuar, sought to discard the very FIR filed by Zakia in 2006, claiming “the way it (FIR) has been drafted suggests that it’s nothing but a piece of waste paper.” Zakia, wife of 2002 post-Godhra riots victim and former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri who was killed in the Gulbarg Society riots, along with 68 others, had filed the complaint with supreme court on June 8, 2006 against Modi and 58 others. Zakia demanded rejection of the closure report filed by the Supreme Court-appointed SIT on February 8, 2012, giving clean chit to Modi and others, and requested filing of chargesheet against them. “In comparison to the complaint as defined in Criminal Procedure Code(CrPC), this (the FIR) is not at all a complaint, it’s a piece of waste paper to be thrown away,” said Jamuar. “It’s a fiction or novel written by 4-5 persons and complainant Zakia has no knowledge about anything written in it,” he argued. Zakia has also demanded further investigations into the case by an independent agency other than the SIT, headed by former CBI director R K Raghavan. Raising the second point of objection, Jamuar cited the content of Zakia’s complaint, claiming “the complainant has presented no case, no evidence..but extracted the material which was submitted before Justice (retired) G T Nanavati-Akshay Mehta Commission”. PTI