NEW DELHI: The Bharatiya Janata Party on Tuesday alleged flip-flop by the then Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government at the Centre in the Ishrat Jahan fake gunfight case and demanded a thorough probe into it.
The probe should look into the manner in which the Centre's affidavit in the case was changed and under whose "pressure" it was done, BJP leader and union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said at a press conference at the party headquarters here.
He alleged that the home ministry affidavit was changed at the "political level".
"On behalf of the Bharatiya Janata Party, we demand that (in) the entire flip-flop in the Ishrat Jahan case, a fair inquiry be done," said Prasad.
Former home secretary G.K. Pillai in a recent TV interview alleged that the then home minister P. Chidambaram bypassed him and rewrote the affidavit submitted to the Gujarat High Court on the alleged gunfight of Ishrat Jahan, a 19-year-old Mumbra student, and three others on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, in 2004.
In August 2009, the home ministry under Chidambaram submitted an affidavit in the Gujarat High Court that referred to Ishrat Jahan's alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba links.
In the second affidavit filed in September 2009, however, references to Ishrat's alleged terror links were not there.
In a recent video-conferenced deposition before a Special court in Mumbai, Lashkar-e-Taiba operative David Coleman Headley from the US jail said he had heard of Ishrat Jahan being a suicide bomber of LeT.