Gujarat ATS detains activist Teesta Setalvad from her house in connection with foreign fund case

|HT|

The Gujarat ATS on Saturday detained activist Teesta Setalvad from her house in connection with a foreign fund case related to her NGO. Teesta Setalvad ‘s NGO had provided information about the 2002 riots t the police and her name has been mentioned in the Supreme Court judgment which upheld the SIT’s clean chit to Narendra Modi. The move of the Gujarat ATS comes hours after Union home minister Amit Shah slammed Teesta Setalvad and said her NGO gave baseless information about the Gujarat riots. Teesta Setalvad's lawyer said the police barged into her house and assaulted her. First, the activist was taken to Santa Cruz police station. From here, she will be taken to Ahmedabad city police station.

"I have read the judgment very carefully. The judgement clearly mentions the name of Teesta Setalvad. The NGO that was run being run by her - I don't remember the name of the NGO- had given baseless information about the riots to the police," Amit Shah, in an exclusive interview said. The Supreme Court on Friday rejected the appeal by Zakia Jafri, wife of Congress MP Ehsan Jafri, who was killed in the Gujarat violence, and said that the appeal was "devoid of merits." A three-judge bench headed by Justice AM Khanwilkar, upholding the Special Investigation Team or SIT's 2012 clean chit to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Gujarat riots case, said that Setalvad, co-petitioner in the case, exploited the emotions of Zakia Jafri. "Antecedents of Teesta Setalvad need to be reckoned with and also because she has been vindictively persecuting this lis [dispute] for her ulterior design by exploiting the emotions and sentiments of Zakia Jafri, the real victim of the circumstances," the top court said in its order.

A total of 68 people, including former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri, were killed in the riots triggered by the burning of a train coach in which 59 pilgrims perished in February 2002. A decade later, the SIT report, exonerated Narendra Modi, citing "no prosecutable evidence" in the Gulbarg Society case.

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