New Delhi, Nov 30 (IANS) The Supreme Court Monday stopped the Gujarat High Court from hearing a state government plea to annul a magisterial probe that indicted the Ahmedabad police for the staged killings of Mumbai college girl Ishrat Jehan and her three friends in June 2004.
An apex court bench of Justice B. Sudershan Reddy and Justice Deepak Verma stopped the high court from conducting any judicial proceeding on the staged killings till Dec 7, when the apex court is slated to hear the matter itself.

The apex court bench took the action on a plea of Ishrat’s mother Shamima Kauser. She urged the apex court to revive Ahmedabad Metropolitan Magistrate S.P. Tamang’s report which indicted the city police for depicting the girl and her three friends as Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives and gunning them down in cold blood.

The high court had earlier on Sep 9 suspended the report.

The apex court bench stopped the high court from conducting any judicial proceeding on various lawsuits in this case as Attorney General G.E. Vahanvati, appearing for the union government, too favoured restraining the high court.

The other pleas the high court was to hear Monday included one by Ahmedabad Anti-Terrorist Squad’s Superintendent of Police G.L. Singhal, who too had sought annulment of Tamang’s report.

Another lawsuit was filed by the father of one of the three youth killed with Ishrat Jehan. Javed Sheikh’s father M.R. Gopinath Pillai moved the high court for a CBI probe into his son’s killing.

The high court was also to hear a plea of Ishrat’s mother Shamima Kausar for an independent probe into her daughter’s killing.

A Gujarat police team had shot dead four people, including the 19-year-old Thane girl, on June 15, 2004, on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, claiming that she was a terror operative who had arrived in the city to eliminate Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

The three others killed by the police team were identified as Javed Ghulam Sheikh alias Pranesh Kumar Pillai, Amjad Ali alias Rajkumar Akbar Ali Rana, and Jisan Johar Abdul Gani.

But Magistrate Tamang, who conducted the mandatory magisterial probe under the provisions of the Criminal Procedure Code, concluded that Ishrat and the three youth were murdered by police in a staged gun battle.

But the state high court on Sep 9, acting on a lawsuit by the Gujarat government, suspended Tamang’s report, saying the report went beyond the jurisdiction of the judicial magistrate.