Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case: IB heartburn over CBI summons

NEW DELHI: There is resentment in the Intelligence Bureau brass and the Home Ministry over CBI’s decision to summon senior IPS officer and Intelligence Bureau Special Director Rajendra Kumar as an accused in the IshratJahan fake encounter case.

Director of Intelligence Bureau, Asif Ibrahim, met CBI Director RanjitSinha at the latter’s North Block office on Tuesday afternoon to voice his concern over CBI’s decision to question the senior IB officer as an accused.

There were a flurry of meetings between Ibrahim and Home Secretary RK Singh over this matter, ET has learnt. CBI had questioned Kumar, a 1979-batch IPS officer, on May 31, when he defended the questionable Intelligence Bureau input generated under his watch in 2004, which said Ishrat along with three other Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists were planning to assassinate Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

Kumar then told CBI that it was not Intelligence Bureau’s job to monitor encounters by state police on its inputs and pointed out that the interrogation report of 26/11 mastermind David Coleman Headley said that Ishrat was a LeT terrorist. But CBI is not satisfied and suspects Kumar conspired with Gujarat police officers to generate the said input.

CBI’s move to summon him again for questioning on June 7 has raised fears at Intelligence Bureau that CBI may be planning to arrest Kumar, who is among the top five officers in IB’s hierarchy.