AHMEDABAD: Former IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt, who was arrested on Tuesday through a transfer warrant in a case of conspiring to falsely implicate innocent people in the 2002 communal riots, was on Wednesday sent to Special Investigation Team (SIT) custody till July 20.
His arrest comes days after social activist Teesta Setalvad and former Director General of Police of Gujarat, R B Sreekumar, were held by the authorities in the same case. “We took Sanjiv Bhatt’s custody from Palanpur jail on transfer warrant and formally arrested him on Tuesday evening,” Ahmedabad Crime Branch’s Deputy Commissioner of Police, Chaitanya Mandlik, said.
Bhatt has been in Palanpur jail since 2018 after he was convicted in a 27-year-old case, wherein he was accused of falsely framing a Rajasthan-based lawyer by planting narcotics on him. During this trial, he was also sentenced to life for a custodial death case in Jamnagar.
On June 24, the Supreme Court dismissed a challenge brought by Zakia Ehsan Jafri that contested the SIT’s closure report and claimed a bigger plot involving officials and other parties in Gujarat riots that followed the Godhra incident.