Ishrat Jahan encounter case: All you want to know

Four people – Ishrat Jahan, Javed Shaikh alias Pranesh Pillai, Amjadali Akbarali Rana and Zeeshan Johar were killed in an encounter with Gujarat Police on the outskirts of Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004.

While asserting that we will continue to fight for justice, he said, “the truth will prevail someday and we are sure that she was not a terrorist and the encounter by the Gujarat police was a fake one”.

– The Ahmedabad Police had claimed that Ishrat and her associates were LeT operatives who were in Gujarat as part of a terror plot to assassinate the then chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi.

January 28, 2011: SIT member Satish Varma filed an affidavit stating that the encounter was a fake one.

September 2009: Ahmedabad metropolitan magistrate SP Tamang called the encounter fake. The Gujarat Government’s petition in the High Court against Tamang’s report said that it should be scrapped as it was “illegal and doubtful”.

While deposing before the court via video link from an undisclosed spot in the United States, Headley said that there was a women’s wing in the LeT.

Headley said that Major Iqbal of ISI gave him money to conduct reconnaissance of possible targets in India.

Headley said earlier in the week that he knew ISI official Brigadier Riyaz as the handler of LeT’s top commander Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, who was the mastermind of the 26/11 attacks. When prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam asked him the exact reason why the plan was cancelled, Headley said it was mostly due to “logistical problems”, which he later meant getting the necessary personnel and weapons.

The LeT operative also said that RBI has turned down a request to open a bank account for their office in India.

“I also got 40,000 in Pakistani currency from LeT operative Sajid Mir between April and June 2008”, he told the court, adding that Major Iqbal used to regularly send him money in instalments.

With this funding, Headley said, he opened an office in south Mumbai’s Tardeo area on September 14, 2006 and the following month, on October 12, 2006, he even applied to Reserve Bank of India for permission to open a business account.

In his statement, he told the court that it was ISI Major Iqbal who gave him $25,000 before going to India. He also said that he was asked to recruit Indian defence officers, who could work as spy for Pakistan.