Documents accessed clearly say that Ishrat Jahan was a part of the LeT and was tasked to kill Narendra Modi.
NEW DELHI: The interrogation of the 64-year-old Tahawwur Rana—whose role as one of the closest friends of David Coleman Headley has been established—if done diligently, is likely to reveal the larger conspiracy hatched by Lashkar-e-Taiba to eliminate the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi in a suicide attack.
Rana, at the behest of Headley, became a part of the LeT conspiracy for the 26/11 attacks around 2005, which overlaps with the period during which Headley and Lashkar commander Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi discussed the Ishrat Jahan operation.
Headley had been associated with Lashkar since 2000.
Three internal documents accessed by The Sunday Guardian clearly say that Ishrat Jahan was a part of the Lashkar-e-Taiba and was tasked to kill Narendra Modi.
One document is a part of the interrogation that NIA did of Headley. The second is a legal document shared by a senior member of the US Embassy posted in 2010, with the Indian agencies quoting the September 2009 interrogation of Headley by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The third is a document shared by the Intelligence Bureau to the Central Bureau of Investigation in February 2013.
All three documents said the same thing: Ishrat Jahan was a part of Lashkar and was tasked to assassinate Narendra Modi.
In fact, the IB document had also revealed that a Pakistan-based Lashkar terrorist, Mehmood Basra, who was arrested by Jammu & Kashmir police long after the encounter of Jahan, had disclosed that Babar @ Abdul Adnan, was a part of the module that had Jahan in it. Basra told the police that he identified Babar from the TV visuals that were shown on 15 June 2004, post the encounter of Jahan along with three others.
The Sunday Guardian was the first to report in June 2013 that Headley had told American investigators that Ishrat Jahan was a part of the Lashkar-e-Taiba.
As revealed in The Sunday Guardian report of February 2016, “Manmohan ministers tried to implicate Modi in the Ishrat case”, a major conspiracy involving a few ministers serving in the United Progressive Alliance (II) and a very senior Congress leader was hatched in 2009 to implicate Narendra Modi and the then Gujarat Home Minister Amit Shah in the encounter case of Jahan.
Tahawwur Rana, who remained closely associated with Headley and Lashkar operatives, is likely to be aware of the identity of the domestic players, if any, who might have had a role to play in the assassination plot against Modi, which eventually failed.
Significantly, in 2009, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) filed an affidavit before the Gujarat High Court stating that Ishrat Jahan had links with terror outfits. This angered a top Congress leader from a western state, who wrote a letter to the Prime Minister’s Office in the first week of September 2009, expressing his dismay as because of the said affidavit, Narendra Modi could no longer be framed in Ishrat Jahan’s encounter.
The Congress leader was unhappy that the MHA’s affidavit had placed on record that Ishrat Jahan was a terrorist as this would weaken their narrative that she was not part of any terror group and this would not allow framing of charges against Modi.
According to officers closely connected with the case and as per the documentary evidence accessed by this newspaper, this plot, presumably to stop Narendra Modi’s ascent to the national stage was worked upon until a few months before the 2014 general elections.
One of the meetings to discuss how to implicate Narendra Modi in the Ishrat case was held in the residence of a Union Cabinet Minister in the first week of October 2013 in New Delhi. In that meeting at least three Union Ministers, the political leader who had written the letter to the PMO, and a very senior officer of the CBI were present.
In that meeting, one of the Union Ministers asked the CBI officer to torture Intelligence Bureau officers so that they would confess that the inputs that Ishrat Jahan was a Lashkar member, were fake and were generated on Narendra Modi’s orders.
It is pertinent to note that the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had strongly advised, multiple times, that the Intelligence Bureau should not be used for political purposes. Even two Home Ministers, who came at different time periods, tried to keep the IB out of this political conspiracy.