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Ahemdabad:
Suspended IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt September 27 filed an affidavit
in the Gujarat High Court alleging that Chief Minister Narendra
Modi and his former Minister of State for Home, Amit Shah, had
repeatedly tried to pressure him to withdraw his report and
destroy the documentary evidence which he had placed on record
regarding the murder of the former Minister, Haren Pandya.
“Failing to persuade me either to withdraw my report or destroy
the very important documentary evidences regarding the role of
certain highly placed State functionaries/politicians and senior
police officers in the killing of Haren Pandya, I was removed from
the post of Superintendent of Police in-charge of the Sabarmati
central jail and was kept without a posting for over
two-and-a-half months,” The Hindu quoted him as saying in
the affidavit.
Bhatt had earlier claimed that it
was Tulsiram Prajapati, the close aide of the fake encounter
victim Sohrabuddin Sheikh, who had actually pulled the trigger on
Haren Pandya, who was killed in the morning of March 26, 2003.
The Central
Bureau of Investigation (CBI) Tuesday told the Supreme Court Amit Shah was the "commander of crime
syndicate with some officials of state police as its foot
soldiers" who would eliminate crucial witnesses in the 2005
Sohrabuddin Sheikh staged shootout.
Haren Pandya murder case had acquired political overtones after his family kept
claiming that it was a political murder. The Central Bureau of
Investigation (CBI) which investigated the case had arrested 15
people out of the 19 named as accused.
In his affidavit, Bhatt said he had collected “very important
documentary evidences” regarding the roles of some “highly placed
functionaries, politicians and others” and forwarded the same to
Shah without realising that the Minister would not appreciate it.
Bhatt claimed that he was told by Shah to “immediately withdraw
the report and destroy the unsavoury documentary evidence.”
But rather than carry out the
instructions, he thought it prudent to send another report along
with copies of the documentary evidences, directly addressed to
the Minister of State for Home, “thereby placing on record the
telephonic conversation and also ensuring that the said crucial
evidence was not disregarded or destroyed by interested parties.”
Bhatt in his affidavit claimed that both Modi and Shah were
“highly disturbed and agitated” by his act, whereby the evidence
was “kept on record despite their instructions to the contrary.”
But “despite strong and coercive persuasion, the petitioner, being
duty-bound, refused to connive in or facilitate the act of
withdrawing and/or destroying the communication sent by me in my
capacity as the Superintendent of Police in-charge of Sabarmati
Central Prison,” Bhatt said in his affidavit.
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