The Gujarat High Court on Friday granted bail to former Director General of Police RB Sreekumar in a case of alleged forgery and fabrication of evidence related to the 2002 Gujarat violence, reported Live Law.

The order came less than a month after the Supreme Court granted bail to activist Teesta Setalvad, who is also an accused person in the case.

Setalvad and Sreekumar were arrested on June 26 last year. Both of them along with former Indian Police Service officer Sanjiv Bhatt have been accused of fabricating evidence about the 2002 Gujarat riots with the objective to destabilise the state government.

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More than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed in the riots. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat at the time.

The High Court had granted interim bail to Sreekumar and Setalvad in September.

In its Friday order, the High Court has directed Sreekumar to surrender his passport and furnish a personal bond of Rs 25,000.

The arrest of Setalvad and Sreekumar

On June 24, the Supreme Court dismissed Zakia Jafri and Setalvad’s plea challenging Modi’s exoneration in the violence. Zakia Jafri is the wife of former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri, was hacked to death when a mob went on a rampage in Gulberg Society in Ahmedabad on February 28, 2002, setting fire to homes.

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While dismissing the petition, the Supreme Court had noted that certain people had filed the petition “to keep the pot boiling for ulterior design”. It said that these people must be “in the dock and proceeded with in accordance with law”.

A day after the judgement, Setalvad and Sreekumar were booked by the Gujarat Police’s Anti-Terrorism Squad. The first information report filed against them quoted heavily from the Supreme Court judgement.

Just before she was arrested, Union Home Minister Amit Shah had accused Setalvad of feeding baseless information to the police about the riots to tarnish Modi’s image.