The one-member inquiry panel of the Union Home Ministry, probing the missing files related to the case of alleged fake encounter of Ishrat Jahan, will submit its report within the next few days.
BK Prasad, a Tamil Nadu-cadre IAS officer, has been given the task to complete the probe. Incidentally, he is due to retire this month-end. The report will be submitted by the month-end, official sources said on Wednesday.
The panel, constituted on March 14 this year, following an uproar in Parliament, was asked to inquire into the circumstances, under which the crucial files related to the case of Ishrat Jahan, who was killed in an alleged fake encounter in Gujarat in 2004, went missing. The panel was asked to find out the person responsible for keeping the files and relevant issues.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh had on March 10 informed Parliament that the files were missing. The papers that went missing from the Home Ministry include the copy of an affidavit vetted by the Attorney General and submitted in the Gujarat High Court in 2009 and the draft of the second affidavit on which changes were made, they said.
Two letters written by the then Home Secretary G K Pillai to the then Attorney General late G E Vahanvati and the copy of the draft affidavit have so far been untraceable, the sources said. The first affidavit was filed on the basis of inputs from Maharashtra and Gujarat Police besides the Intelligence Bureau where it was said the 19-year-old girl from Mumbai outskirts was a Lashkar-e-Taiba activist but it was ignored in the second affidavit, they said.