By IANS
Surat : Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi seems to have courted trouble by justifying the staged police killing of an innocent Muslim youth even as the Election Commission Wednesday indicated it would wait for an official report before deciding on any action against him.
“I have not yet received a report from the Surat collector on the speech by Narendra Modi,” Chief Election Commissioner N. Gopalaswamy said in reply to reporters’ queries.
Gopalaswami along with the two elections commissioners was in this south Gujarat city to assess the preparedness ahead of the Dec 11 and Dec 16 assembly polls.
He said he had read media reports on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader’s speech. “Once we read an official report on it from the collector we will decide what to do.”
Addressing an election rally in Mangrol town of Surat district, Modi Tuesday said Sohrabuddin Sheikh – an innocent Muslim killed in a ‘shootout’ with police near Ahmedabad in 2005 – deserved to be killed.
Acting on a plea by the victim’s brother, the Supreme Court earlier this year ordered a probe in the killing, leading to the arrest of several top Gujarat cops.
The Gujarat government, in an affidavit before the Supreme Court, had also admitted that its anti-terrorist squad had erred in killing Sheikh after wrongly branding him a terrorist.
Modi’s remarks also drew ire from activist Teesta Setalvad of the Citizens for Peace and Justice who complained to the Election Commission.