Home Secy rubbishes witness 'tutoring' report in Ishrat case

 Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi today rubbished a report that a witness was tutored in the course of inquiry into the missing documents related to the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case.

Mehrishi was here to attend a meeting of Home Ministers, Chief Secretaries and Directors General of Police of coastal states and Union Territories.

"I hotly deny tutoring of witnesses. Files in the Home Ministry are never lost. They might get misplaced. But I am confident they will be located somewhere. The file (is) in Home Ministry," Mehrishi told reporters when asked for comment on the newspaper report.

According to the report, B K Prasad, a senior Home Ministry official, coached a former official of the ministry in April this year on questions Prasad would be putting to him and how the latter should answer that he had never seen the purported missing papers.

Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju, who also attended the meeting, said the former Union Home Minister P Chidambaram tried to give a clean chit to Ishrat Jahan -- who was killed in an allegedly fake encounter alongwith three others in Gujarat in 2004 -- during the UPA rule.

"We have already got the reports by the one-man committee constituted by the Ministry of Home Affairs. We have seen the report and some of the important documents are still untraceable. And the intention is very clear. How these important documents are taken out of the records in the Home Ministry and why a hardcore terrorist was declared as innocent through an affidavit?" Rijiju said.