JOIN US'Ishrat's was not fake encounter'
In a revelation that can embarrass the previous UPA government, former Union home secretary G K Pillai has accused the Congress of politicising the 2004 Ishrat Jahan encounter case which was used to target Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
During an interview to a news channel, Pillai said that he was not instrumental in getting the ministry to file contradictory affidavit in the Jahan case where a group of Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorists were gunned down by the Gujarat Police.
In fact, according to him, the affidavit was filed after intervention at the political level, making it obvious that the then Congress-led UPA government was responsible.
On the intelligence agency-Gujarat Police operation, he said: “We enticed the LeT operatives to come to India and target Prime Minister Narendra Modi (then Gujarat CM) and we laid a trap and killed them. The IB had enticed and trapped them and then targeted them. We used a source who they (LeT) thought was their source. It is always better to know your enemy as he is coming in rather than wait for him to plan an operation on his own without our knowledge. Our source had in fact told them that ‘look if you come in you can target Modi and other high profile people’ and the LeT decided to come in”. Pillai stated that Ishrat was “a cover” for the LeT and argued that it would be wrong to call it a fake encounter -- a charge slapped by the UPA government on Gujarat Police officers who were involved in the encounter.
“This was an intel operation involving the LeT. If it was an intel operation, then you should not talk about fake encounter. We should make that distinction. We can’t mix up the two. Ishrat knew that something was wrong. An unmarried Muslim girl went with a married person, spent nights with him as husband and wife. She was a cover for them,” he told the channel.