By TCN Special Correspondent,/b>
Ahmedabad: Senior IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt has alleged that the Special Investigation Team (SIT) leaked out the details about the inquiry being conducted into the 2002 riot cases to the state government officials.
This has again put a question mark on the credibility of the SIT probe which was earlier questioned by several human rights activists.
Bhatt has made these allegations in a petition filed before the Supreme Court seeking transfer of the investigation outside the state into a criminal case registered against him by a police constable K D Pant.
Pant, in his complaint filed recently, had said that Bhatt had forced him to sign an affidavit stating that he(Bhatt) participated in a high level meeting held at the residence of Chief Minister Narendra Modi after the Godhra train burning incident on May Feb. 27, 2002 and Modi asked police officials not to prevent Hindu mobs from attacking Muslims.
In the petition, Bhatt has alleged that he has found two mails by someone from the SIT into the personal mail account of Additional Advocate General Tushar Mehta.
Though Bhatt has not mentioned the details in the SIT emails to Mehta, he has said that the mails contained “sensitive and confidential’’ details about the investigations being conducted by SIT into the heinous riot cases.
Bhatt has submitted print outs of the two mails to the apex court.
Bhatt and Mehta have been very close friends, with both of them going on vacations together with their families.
Bhatt came to know about the mails when he accessed Mehta’s mail account ([email protected]) to confirm travel details for a joint family holiday trip to Goa in September 2009.
According to Bhatt, mails were sent to Mehta from [email protected], the official email account of the SIT.
Bhatt’s petition says that he again accessed Mehta’s email account several times between February 2010 and June 2010 for a joint family holiday trip and found SIT mails into Mehta’s account.
Bhatt alleges that SIT emails to Mehta on the progress of the inquiry indicates “unholy nexus’’ among the state government authorities and the SIT sleuths, intended to protect highly placed persons from prosecution.
The petition says that Bhatt informed SIT official A K Malhotra about leakage of the SIT probe report to Mehta.