Photo: Hindustan Times
Ahmedabad/NDTV: One of Gujarat’s most controversial police officers, DG Vanzara, is likely to walk out of jail soon after he was granted bail today in the 2004 killing of college student Ishrat Jahan. But a court in Ahmedabad said he can’t enter Gujarat.
Eight police officers were charge-sheeted in the case. Four were granted bail earlier and today, two more got it – Mr Vanzara and another police officer, PP Pande.
Mr Vanzara was granted bail in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter killing case of 2005 in September.
He has been in a jail in Ahmedabad for eight years for cases that earned him the nickname of “encounter specialist”. He retired last year. He was arrested in March 2007, when he was a Deputy Inspector General of Police, for the Sohrabuddin killing.
Sohrabuddin, a petty criminal, his wife Kauser Bi and Tulsiram Prajapati were traveling on a bus from Andhra Pradesh in 2005 when they were kidnapped by the Gujarat police. Sohrabuddin and his wife were killed a few days later. Tulsiram, a key witness to their abduction, was shot dead a year later; the police claimed that he was trying to escape.
Mr Vanzara was also made an accused in the killing of Ishrat Jahan, a 19-year-old, and three men in 2004. All four were shot dead by police officers who claimed that they were involved in a plot to kill Narendra Modi, who was Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time.
In 2013, Mr Vanzara quit the force and shot off a vitriolic letter in which he accused Mr Modi and BJP president Amit Shah, a former Home Minister of Gujarat, of making him and other police officers scapegoats for following their orders.
In December, a court in Mumbai accepted Amit Shah’s discharge petition and said he will not face charges in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh killing.
