Jailed whistleblower police officer Sanjiv Bhatt who, as a whistleblower, exposed Narendra Modi’s role in the 2002 Gujarat Muslim genocide, was on Tuesday arrested by a Special Investigation Team for allegedly committing forgery and fabricating evidence in a case related to the 2002 genocide.
The officer has been in jail since 2018 in a case of custodial death in Jamnagar that was registered in 1990.
Bhatt is the third person to be arrested in this 2002 genocide case after human rights defender Teesta Setalvad and former Gujarat Director General of Police RB Sreekumar.
Setalvad and Sreekumar were arrested by the Gujarat Police’s Anti-Terrorism Squad on 26 June, two days after the Supreme Court had dismissed a plea filed by Setalvad and Zakia Jafri, the wife of former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri who was killed by Hindutva mob during genocide.
Several international organisations of human rights including United Nationalist human rights body had criticised the case against the trio and called for the release of Bhatt, Setalvad and Sreekumar.
In 2011, Bhatt had claimed that he had attended a meeting at Modi’s house where the former chief minister had asked the administrative officials to be lenient with the Hindu rioters.
The FIR against Bhatt claimed that he used forged evidence to establish his presence in the meeting.
Chaitanya Mandlik, the deputy commissioner of police of the Ahmedabad Crime Branch and a member of the Special Investigation Team formed to look into the alleged forgery, said on Tuesday that Bhatt was taken into custody on a transfer warrant and subsequently arrested.
