CBI challenges order to provide IB report to accused cops

The CBI has moved the Gujarat High Court, challenging a special court order which had directed the probe agency, to provide a copy of a classified Intelligence Bureau (IB) report to the eight cops accused of the alleged 2003 Sadiq Jamal fake encounter case.
The CBI's appeal, which was filed on March 29 and is likely to be heard next week, had also made the IB's joint director a respondent in the case, besides the eight accused cops.
On February 1, a special CBI court had ordered the agency to provide a copy of a classified report prepared by the IB on January 6, 2003, after Jamal was handed over to Gujarat police custody.

While partly accepting the accused cops' plea, the CBI court had asked the agency to give a certain portion of the IB's Subsidiary Intelligence Bureau of Mumbai.
The court had also ordered giving a portion of the report after excluding the name and designation of those who could be put in danger if their names are revealed.
The court had also put a pre-condition on the lawyers of the prosecution and the defence that they would not make certain portions of the report public.

Earlier, the CBI had argued before the court that revealing the IB report's content would threaten "national security".

Sadiq Jamal, a resident of Bhavnagar, was killed in an alleged fake encounter by the Gujarat police in Ahmedabad on January 13, 2003.
The genuineness of the encounter became an issue after Mumbai-based former journalist Ketan Tirodkar filed an affidavit before a Mumbai court that he witnessed Jamal being handed over to the Gujarat police by Mumbai police 'encounter specialist' cop Daya Nayak, a few days before the alleged fake encounter.