By IANS,
New Delhi: The Supreme Court Tuesday ordered the Gujarat government to provide various official documents to a special probe panel to facilitate its ongoing probe into cases of mass-murder during the statewide communal riots following the Godhra train carnage Feb 27, 2002.
A bench of Justice D.K. Jain, Justice P. Sathasivam and Justice Aftab Alam, however, gave the state government five months to hand over the requisite documents to the probe panel headed by former Central Bureau of Investigation Director A.K. Raghvan.
The bench gave the direction to the state government on a communication by the probe panel, which said it had not got a prompt reply from the state government on the supply of the documents.
Quoting from the communication, the bench asked the Gujarat government counsel why the government had supplied only one document despite requisition of 14 documents and that too after three reminders.
At this, state government counsel Hemantika Wahi pleaded that the state government was not averse to supplying the documents but it needed time to provide the same. She asked for five months to supply the documents.
The documents that the probe panel headed by Raghvan needed included various state intelligence inputs to the Union home ministry, besides the transcripts of several speeches of Chief Minister Narendra Modi delivered both before the Godhra train carnage and after it.