The Bharatiya Janata Party yesterday demanded that the government divulge what was found when the National Investigation Agency (NIA) examined Pakistani-American terrorist David Coleman Headley in the US.
BJP spokesperson Meenakshi Lekhi also noted that the National Human Rights Commission had not termed the shootout that killed Ishrat Jahan and three men in 2004 a staged one.  Lekhi said the government had prepared a 10,000-page report on the 26/11 Mumbai attack, largely based on Headley’s statements. That report was sent to Pakistan as proof of Lashker-e-Taiba (LeT) and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) involvement in the November 2008 attack in Mumbai, in which at least 166 people were killed.
She said the BJP hoped that Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde had gone through the National Investigation Agency’s examination of Headley. “The Congress-run government has started a dangerous trend of making LeT operatives to seem like victims while converting security forces into demons. The perception being created is that David Headley is not a credible source, and FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) report is also fiction,” she said.
The BJP spokesperson hoped that Shinde would not act like the member of a political party. “The home minister must make the entire report and (Headley’s) remarks pertaining to the Ishrat Jahan’s case public,” she said.
A Central Bureau of Investigation report submitted recently concluded that Jahan had no terrorist links, and was killed in a staged shootout. The BJP has also asked the home ministry to explain the change in its affidavit between 2007 and 2009 - the first affidavit had said that there was credible intelligence information linking those killed to terrorists, while the second had said that the tip-off did not warrant the killing of Ishrat Jahan and three others.
Earlier the family of Ishrat Jahan said she was innocent and had been framed as a terrorist. “She was somebody who used to be scared of cockroaches and lizards. How could she be a terrorist and kill people,” her sister asked at a press conference. She said the fight has been going on for the last nine years since Jahan was killed in 2004. “Every channel has been asking whether she was a terrorist or not. A girl who was taking care of the entire family... whose father had died long back, how can she be a terrorist,” the sister asked.