Former Indian Police Service officer Sanjiv Bhatt was on Tuesday arrested by a Special Investigation Team for allegedly committing forgery and fabricating evidence in a case related to the 2002 Gujarat riots, reported PTI. The officer has been in jail since 2018 in a case of custodial death in Jamnagar that was registered in 1990.
Bhatt is the third person to be arrested in this 2002 riots case after activist Teesta Setalvad and former Gujarat Director General of Police RB Sreekumar.
They were arrested by the Gujarat Police’s Anti-Terrorism Squad on June 26, two days after the Supreme Court had dismissed a plea filed by Setalvad and Zakia Jafri, the wife of former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri.
The activist and Zakia Jafri had challenged the a Special Investigation Team report that had cleared Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the 2002 Gujarat riots case. Modi was the chief minister of the state during the riots.
The court had said that the petition was filed “to keep the pot boiling for ulterior design”. The first information report cited a portion of the Supreme Court judgement that said that “all those involved in such abuse of process, need to be in the dock and proceeded with in accordance with law”.
In 2011, Bhatt had claimed that he had attended a meeting at Modi’s house where the former chief minister had asked the administrative officials to be lenient with the rioters, according to The Times of India. The FIR claimed that Bhatt used forged evidence to establish his presence in the meeting.
Chaitanya Mandlik, the deputy commissioner of police of the Ahmedabad Crime Branch, said on Tuesday that Bhatt was taken into custody on a transfer warrant and subsequently arrested. Mandlik is a member of the Special Investigation Team formed to look into the alleged forgery.
Before Bhatt was arrested, several international organisations of human rights had criticised the case and called for the release of Setalvad and Sreekumar.
On June 27, 2,231 residents from 21 states condemned the arrests and said that the Supreme Court’s judgement on the plea of Zakia Jafri deepens the sense of injustice and marks a moment of profound hurt and loss for all those who care about constitutional values.
“The Supreme Court not only dismissed the idea that there was a conspiracy to commit the crimes of murder, rape and destruction of property, but instead went further and took to task those who sought to ensure justice for the communal hate crimes following the Godhra incident,” the signatories had said.
The United Nations Human Rights Office had said on June 28 that Setalvad, Sreekumar and Bhatt “must not be persecuted for their activism and solidarity with the victims of the 2002 Gujarat riots”.
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