Anaju Chaudhary, the fifth accused cop in the 2004 Ishrat Jahan encounter case, was today granted bail by a special CBI court here after the central probe agency failed to file its charge sheet within the stipulated period of 90 days following his arrest.
Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate (ACJM) of the special CBI court S H Khutwad today granted default bail to Chaudhary, as CBI did not keep up with the time frame as envisaged in the section 167(2) of the CrPC.
Chaudhary is the fifth accused, out of six arrested till date in the alleged encounter case by the CBI. He was arrested on February 27 this year.
On May 24, the court had granted default bail to suspended IPS officer G L Singhal, and three other policemen Tarun Barot, J G Parmar and Bharat Patel.
The sixth accused arrested in the case is former DySP N K Amin, who was arrested on April 4. He is also an undertrial accused in another case of Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter.
On June 15, 2004, 19-year-old Ishrat along with Javed Shaikh alias Pranesh Pillai, Amjadali Akbarali Rana and Zeeshan Johar, were killed in a fake encounter on the outskirts of Ahmedabad.
At the time of encounter, Chaudhary was an SRP commando allotted to alleged encounter specialist Tarun Barot. The Gujarat police had claimed that all four were terrorists who had entered the city to kill Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.