Thaindian News

Ahmedabad, May 18 (IANS) The chief judicial magistrate of Kutch Wednesday granted permission to the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing the key 2002 communal riot cases to question suspended IAS officer Pradeep Sharma who has volunteered information on Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s alleged anti-minority stance during the riots.

He is likely to be questioned in the Bhuj jail on May 24.

The permission for questioning Sharma, booked for a 2002 Kutch killer earthquake land scam in the period he was the district collector, is a sequel to a letter he wrote to the SIT head volunteering information on the Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s anti-minority conduct in relation to the 2002 communal riots.

Sharma in a letter to the SIT chairman, R.K. Raghavan, last month had claimed that during the riots he had received a call from the chief minister’s office asking him to counsel his IPS brother to “abstain from taking any pro-active measures in favour of the minorities”.

Sharma was the Jamnagar municipal commissioner while his elder brother, Kuldip Sharma, was the inspector general of police, Ahmedabad range. Sharma volunteered to reveal the name of the person in the chief minister’s office who had contacted him and the details of the conversation.

Meanwhile, the special public prosecutor for the Dipda Darwaja massacre case in Visnagar in Mehsana district in which 11 people were killed, has sought the SIT head’s permission to retire from the case alleging that the judge presiding over the fast track court holding the trial in the case was not prepared to listen to his arguments.

This is the fourth special public prosecutor seeking to quit on similar or related grounds. Earlier, the public prosecutors of Gulberg Society, Naroda Gaam and the Ode massacre cases had sought to be kept out.