KOCHI: Gopinathan Pillai’s death in a road accident has raised eyebrows as he was legally fighting against his son being branded a ‘terrorist’, and also a CBI special court order that discharged former Gujarat DGP P P Pandey in the alleged fake encounter case after the investigation agency had arraigned him as an accused.
Top state intelligence officers told Express that as of now there was nothing to suspect the accident to be a plot to finish off Pillai. “We are looking into the accident in detail for leads,” the officers added.
Police officers said they will peruse visuals from traffic surveillance cameras at the accident spot and the route through which Pillai’s car had passed on the fateful day.
It’s a fact that Pillai had been under the prying eyes of different intelligence agencies ever since Javed Sheikh alias Pranesh Pillai was allegedly killed in a fake encounter along with Ishrat Jahan and two others in 2004.
Later, the going got tough for the Ahmedabad police and senior IPS officers after Pillai launched a legal fight to book the police officers. He wasn’t ready to buy the police version that his son was a terrorist and was plotting to target the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. For the past 14 years, Pillai had been fighting the biggest slur possible, of being the father of a ‘terrorist’. His determination to fight the injustice was evident every time he contested the affidavits of the Gujarat police.
“It was grief that helped me negate the fear that I felt right through my fight for justice,” Pillai had told Express in an interview in 2013.“Like any other law-abiding citizen, I was shattered when I heard that my son was killed in an encounter and that he had terrorist links. Initially I was ashamed to face the public. But soon it became clear to me that it was a cooked-up case and if I did not defend my dead son, no one else would,” he added in the interview.