Daily Bhaskar:Saturday, December 24, 2011.
Indore: An IPS officer’s RTI application seeking information of the 2002 Sameer Khan Pathan encounter case in Gujarat has caused a flutter in Madhya Pradesh.
The state has a vital link in Gujarat’s yet another controversial encounter case following Pathan’s passport which akin to the case of extradited gangster Abu Salem was issued fraudulently from Regional Passport Office (RPO), Bhopal.
Controversy; while Gujarat police claimed that Pathan had travelled to Pakistan with this passport in January 1998, the then officials of the Bhopal RPO had testified that the passport was issued two months after the said visit. Moreover, the matter whether the passport was fake, is yet to be ascertained by the MP police.
The case has resurfaced following an RTI application filed by deputy inspector general (DIG) (armed units) Rajkot Rahul Sharma recently. Sharma has filed RTI at the Gujarat Director General of Police (DGP's) office seeking details of the Pathan encounter case; information on the officers involved, the witnesses, besides, the statements, the panchnama and all relevant documents and enclosures in the chargesheet.
Pathan, a resident of Jamalpur in Gujarat was shot dead on October 22, 2002 allegedly after he tried to snatch a police officer's weapon and kill him to escape the police custody. Pathan was on the run for six years in a chain snatching case, before he was caught on September 27, 2002.
After the encounter, the then DCP DG Vanzara, told media that Pathan had received terrorist training with the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) in Pakistan with a passport acquired from Bhopal and was out to kill chief minister Narendra Modi, senior leader BJP LK Advani and and the Vishwa Hindu Prashid (VHP) leader Pravin Togadia.
Later in the court, Gujarat police had produced 12 co-accused in the case against Pathan, including Abubakr of Bhopal, alleging they had helped him procure fake documents, including a passport and driving licence under a false name of Nawab Khan, from Bhopal. They also said that Pathan had gone to Pakistan on January 13, 1998 using that passport.
However, the then passport officer TD Sharma testified in the lower court that a passport under the name of Nawab Khan was delivered only on March 27, 1998 and thus it was not a subject matter of the conspiracy. Sharma had stated that issuing of the passport was a result of a clerical mistake, "but nothing is brought out that any mistake has been committed by the accused." The court thus dismissed the case.
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