No 'political expectations' in Ishrat Jahan case, says CBI chief

The BJP may have cheered the exclusion of Amit Shah and Narendra Modi from the supplementary chargesheet filed by the CBI in the Ishrat Jahan case, but CBI director Ranjit Sinha has said that he was under no pressure from the UPA government and they have been completely impartial in their probe. “We have done the Ishrat Jahan case on merit. The chargesheet is filed with all due diligence.  Our mandate was to investigate murder of Ishrat and others in cold blood,” Sinha told CNN-IBN today. He also said that there was no evidence on record to suggest the involvement of either of the two BJP leaders in the incident. [caption id=“attachment_1379961” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Sinha denied there was any political pressure on the agency. AFP[/caption] In another report, Sinha has said that there were “political expectations” from the investigating agency during the course of the probe but they had carried out the investigations impartially. “The UPA government would have been very happy if we had charged Amit Shah… But we went strictly by evidence and found there was no prosecutable evidence against Shah,” Sinha was quoted as saying by the Economic Times.  Sinha has since told CNN-IBN that he was misquoted by the newspaper. The CBI chief also claimed they had faced pressure from the Intelligence Bureau, whose ex-special director has been named as an accused in the chargesheet. “The IB tried to convince me on certain issues but we went ahead with the supplementary chargesheet because we have enough circumstantial evidence against the four officers,” Sinha was quoted as saying in the Hindustan Times. He also claimed that the internal security agency had refused to share documents with the CBI during the course of the probe but it never led to any confrontation, as claimed by some reports earlier. The CBI in its supplementary chargesheet filed in connection with the murder of Ishrat Jahan and three others in 2004. The Intelligence Bureau’s former special director Rajinder Kumar is among four persons charged with murder, criminal conspiracy, wrongful confinement, kidnapping, wrongful concealment.