New Delhi: A bench of the Supreme Court headed by Justice A M Khanwilkar upheld the decision of the Ahmedabad Metropolitan Magistrate on 24 June to accept the closure report of the Special Investigation Team (SIT) — which was appointed by the top court — rejecting the protest petition filed by Zakia Ahsan Jafri, widow of former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri.
The SIT formed by the Supreme Court had submitted a closure report in 2012 giving clean chit to then CM of the state of Gujarat Narendra Modi after a preliminary investigation into the complaint filed by Zakia against Modi and 63 others including bureaucrats and policemen. It said there was no prosecutable evidence against them.
The Metropolitan Magistrate’s court endorsed the clean chit.
Zakia filed a petition before the Gujarat High Court against the SIT report. The Gujarat High Court in 2017 dismissed the petition. She then filed a protest petition before the Supreme Court against accepting the SIT’s report.
The bench dismissed Zakia Jafri’s plea and said it found the appeal ‘devoid of merits’ in its judgement.
“After cogitating over the matter, we uphold the decision of the Magistrate in accepting the stated final report dated 8.2.2012 submitted by the SIT, as it is and rejecting the protest petition filed by the appellant. We do not countenance the submission of the appellant regarding infraction of rule of law in the matter of investigation and the approach of the Magistrate and the High Court in dealing with the final report,” the SC bench said in its judgment on Friday.
