A sessions court here on Friday deferred to Saturday its order on the bail pleas of social activist Teesta Setalvad and former Gujarat DGP RB Sreekumar, arrested for allegedly fabricating evidence to frame innocent people in the 2002 post-Godhra riots cases.
The order on the bail applications of Setalvad and Sreekumar, who were arrested in late June and currently lodged in jail under judicial custody, has been deferred multiple times this week.
The court of Additional Principal Judge DD Thakkar was originally scheduled to give its ruling on Tuesday. It was first deferred to Thursday, then Friday and now Saturday.
The court said the order was not yet ready.
The judge had last week reserved his order after hearing arguments from the counsels appearing for Setalvad, Sreekumar and the prosecution.
Besides the duo, former IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt is also an accused in the case and all three were arrested by the Ahmedabad city crime branch under sections 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating) and 194 (giving or fabricating false evidence with intent to procure conviction for capital offence) of the Indian Penal Code. Bhatt was already in jail in a separate criminal case.
During the arguments on the bail pleas, the Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Gujarat police, constituted to probe the case, had told the court that Setalvad and Sreekumar were part of a "larger conspiracy" hatched at the behest of late Congress leader Ahmed Patel to destabilise the BJP government headed by then-Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
At Patel's behest, Setalvad received Rs 30 lakh after the post-Godhra riots that was used for the said purpose, the SIT alleged while opposing her bail plea.
Sreekumar was a "disgruntled government officer" who "abused the process for damning the elected representatives, bureaucracy and police administration of the whole state of Gujarat for ulterior purposes," the SIT has alleged. They also tutored witnesses, it claimed.
Both Setalvad and Sreekumar have denied allegations made against them.
An FIR (first information report) was registered against them after the Supreme Court last month dismissed a plea filed by Zakia Jafri, whose husband and former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri, was killed during the riots.
The plea alleged a "larger conspiracy" behind the 2002 riots in Gujarat. However, the apex court upheld a previous SIT's clean chit to Modi and 63 others.
In its judgment, the Supreme Court had observed that, "At the end of the day, it appears to us that a coalesced effort of the disgruntled officials of the State of Gujarat along with others was to create sensation by making revelations which were false to their own knowledge. "The falsity of their claims had been fully exposed by the SIT after a thorough investigation... As a matter of fact, all those involved in such abuse of process, need to be in the dock and proceed in accordance with law." Ehsan Jafri was among the 68 people killed at Ahmedabad's Gulberg Society during communal riots on February 28, 2002, a day after a mob torched a coach of the Sabarmati Express near Godhra station, leading to the death of 59 passengers.
The statewide riots triggered by the train burning incident had killed 1,044 people. The central government had informed the Rajya Sabha in May 2005 that 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus were killed in the post-Godhra riots.
