Was Ishrat Jahan a terrorist? Headley said so

New Delhi: CBI's chargesheet in the Ishrat Jahan case, filed on Wednesday, claims that the college student and three others were in the custody of the Gujarat police prior to their killing in what was a fake encounter. But in a major twist, Mumbai attack terrorist David Coleman Headley has reportedly said that the 19-year-old Mumbra girl, was a suicide bomber and had terror links. Headley had reportedly told the National Investigation Agency (NIA) that a terror plan, plotted by Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) commander Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi, had failed after the death of Ishrat Jahan and three other men who accompanied her. The Headley revelation after the CBI on Wednesday filed its first chargesheet in connection with the encounter case. This information was in the interrogation report of Headley that was given to the Intelligence Bureau. The document was also made available to the media. But in the latter, the two paras that refer to Ishrat Jahan are missing. Sources in the National Investigating Agency say that the information was removed because Headley's testimony was "hearsay." The Intelligence Bureau disagrees. It says it had inputs that the Mumbai teen and her associates were a terror unit, and in 2004, it was this information that the Gujarat branch of the Intelligence Bureau shared with the police. But in its first chargesheet filed in the case this week, the CBI did not touch upon whether the group that was shot dead by the Gujarat Police and the state's Intelligence Bureau had terror links. This omission, the BJP says, proves that the government is witholding crucial facts, in an attempt to discredit the Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and his administration. The CBI has blamed the Intelligence Bureau and the Gujarat Police for killing Ishrat and three others in “cold blood”. In 2004, a Lahore-based publication affiliated with LeT claimed that Ishrat and her companions were operatives, but in 2007, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the political wing of the LeT retracted the statement as a "journalistic mistake", offering apology to Ishrat's family. In June 2013, the Intelligence Bureau chief Asif Ibrahim told the office of Prime Minister and Home Minister of India that the Bureau had enough evidence to prove that Ishrat was a part of an LeT module which planned to kill Narendra Modi and Lal Krishna Advani. The encounter was carried out by a team led by DIG D.G. Vanjara, who was later jailed for his alleged involvement in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter. Ishrat, hailing from Mumbra in Thane district adjoining Mumbai, Javed Shaikh alias Pranesh Pillai, Amjadali Akbarali Rana and Zeeshan Johar were killed in the encounter with the Gujarat police on the outskirts of Ahmedabad on June 15, 2004.