Amit Shah said forget about probing officers: Cop to CBI

Shah e kahiyu kai ek PI ni su taakat che kai e senior officers same tapas kare? Papers javaa do Shah said how dare a Police Inspector conduct a probe against his senior officers? Forget those papers.....

Shah e kahiyu kai ek PI ni su taakat che kai e senior officers same tapas kare? Papers javaa do Shah said how dare a Police Inspector conduct a probe against his senior officers? Forget those papers. CBI sources said this is what IGP Geeta Johri,who was leading the Gujarat CID probe into the 2005 killing of alleged gangster Sohrabuddin Sheikh and the disappearance of his wife Kausar Bi,told Inspector V L Solanki who was then investigating the case under her charge.

In his statement to the CBI,Solanki alleged that Johri,on the instruction of then junior Home Minister Amit Shah,asked him to forget the papers and evidences in the case against top police officers,including then Border Range DIG D G Vanzara,SP Rajkumar Pandian and Udaipur SP Dinesh M N. But he did not follow the orders.

Mara pita nu naam Lalji che. Jo Laljibhai kahe to pan papers nahi javaa dau kem kai e loko e ek nirdosh stri ni hatya kari che My fathers name is Lalji. I could not have let the papers go even if Laljibhai had asked me to do so,because they the officers killed an innocent woman, Solanki was quoted as having told the CBI.

The sources said CBIs second round of questioning of Johri is likely to be based largely on Solanki statement about the alleged pressure to change the course of investigation.

Solanki had begun investigating the case under Johris supervision in June 2006. In his earlier statement to the CBI,he said that a request he filed on December 13,2006,seeking permission to interrogate Tulsiram Prajapati in Udaipur jail,disappeared from the files Prajapati was the lone witness when Sohrabuddin and Kausar Bi were taken away by Gujarat and Rajasthan policemen from a Hyderabad-Sangli bus.

A fortnight after Solanki put in a request to question him,Prajapati was shot dead on December 28,2006 at Chappri village in Ambaji by Gujarat and Rajasthan policemen. CBI sources said the missing Solanki paper is a link that connects the cases of Sohrabuddin and Prajapati Gujarat police had all along maintained that the two cases were not related.

Incidentally,in an interim report to the Supreme Court on May 12,2007 in connection with a writ petition filed by Sohrabuddins brother Rubabuddin Sheikh,Johri sought permission to interrogate Prajapati five months after he had been shot dead.

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The Supreme Court then slammed Johri for failing to produce Solankis second report on the probe: We have observed that from the record,it was found that V L Solanki,an investigating officer,was proceeding in the right direction,but Ms Johri had not been carrying out the investigation in the right manner8230;

It appears that Ms Johri had not made any reference to the second report of Solanki,and though his first report was attached with one of her reports,the same was not forwarded to this court8230; we are of the view that her mentioning the criminal background of Sohrabuddin and the discussion among the accused officers concerning Sohrabuddin was meant to obfuscate the enquiry, the SC had observed.