D G Vanzara arrested by CBI team probing the Ishrat Jahan encounter case

Vanzara who is lodged in Taloja jail in Navi Mumbai after being shifted to Mumbai in Sohrabuddin encounter case along with Gujarat cop Rajkumar Pandian,Rajasthan cop Dinesh MN and others had played a ‘incriminating role’ in the Ishrat Jahan encounter in 2004. A team of CBI officers reached Mumbai on Monday evening to take his custody.

A CBI officer associated with the case confirmed to the paper,”The CBI court had granted the permission to take custody of DG Vanzara from Taloja jail in Sohrabuddin encounter to Ishrat encounter. He will be brought on a transit remand and produced before the court for his custody in this case”

Vanzara was the DCP of the Ahmedabad Crime Branch that encountered Mumbai girl Ishrat and her aides Javed Pillai and two alleged Pakistani terrorirsts Amjad Ali Rana and Jishan Johar.

The ‘deemed suspended’ cop G L Singhal who was recently released on bail had named Vanzara as one of the master planners of the Ishrat encounter case,in his statements to CBI. According to the CBI probe in this case,Vanzara had partnered then JCP Crime PP Pandey in hatching the encounter plan. He was instrumental in taking Ishrat and Javed’s custody and holding them captive in Arham farmhouse of Gandhinagar a day before their encounter.

The CBI investigation also showed that Vanzara had worked upon the intelligence input that was generated by Central IB’s then Joint Director Rajinder Kumar that ‘two alleged Pakistanis of Lashkar-e-Toiba were coming in a blue Tata Indica car to kill Chief Minister Narendra Modi….’ and formed encounter squads under jailed DSP N K Amin and GL Singhal.

Vanzara had also played an important role in doctoring the intel input with Rajinder Kumar who changed the input twice before the encounter- one a month before and second a day before that was given to Pandey.

Ishrat and her friend Javed alias Pranesh Pillai and two alleged Pakistanis were killed at Kotarpur Waterworks in outskirts of Ahmedabad on June 15,2004.