Vanzara's arrest may hit Pandya murder probe

AHMEDABAD: When Gujarat's former minister of state for home Haren Pandya was killed on March 26, 2003, the police officer who held charge of the case till CBI took over was D G Vanzara, the IPS officer arrested in the Sohrabuddin fake encounter case.
The CBI, then under the BJP-led NDA regime, carried on with Vanzara's line of investigation and called it an "ISI-conspired killing" carried out by Dawood's men to avenge the killing of Muslims in the post-Godhra riots of 2002.On Friday, the Pandya murder case came close to a verdict, till the Pota court put it off to June 18. But now with Vanzara's credibility under a scanner, one wonders how much the case could depend on the evidence collected by an officer now infamous for fabricating evidence.
Soon after Pandya's killing, Vanzara accompanied the body to the post-mortem room and supervised the reports, which are now being questioned.
As deputy commissioner in the crime branch, Vanzara ran a spate of arrests of young Muslims from a particular sect, from the Kalupur area of Ahmedabad and booked them under the famously called "ISI conspiracy case", a convenient cover to explain Vanzara's meddling in the case when CBI had already taken over.
Questions are being raised on why the lookout notice for Mufti Sufiyan Patangia, the mastermind behind the Pandya murder, came 12 days after the killing, giving him enough time to flee. CBI investigators admit that by the time the agency took over the probe, vital clues were lost.
The first information of Pandya's murder came at least three hours after the incident. "This gave enough time to the killers and witnesses to disappear," says an officer.
By 2005, when the UPA came to power at the Centre, the BJP government in Gujarat was perhaps in no mood to help CBI and cracks in the case appeared.
The same year, Patangia's wife and two children, who were supposed to have been "under observation" by Vanzara's men, fled the country for which no explanation was sought.