The Supreme Court on Friday rejected the petition of Zakia Jafri, the wife of slain Congress leader Ehsan Jafri, in the 2002 Gujarat riots case.

A plea was filed in the top court seeking a probe into allegations of a larger conspiracy and questioning the clean chit to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and 63 others. The court called Jafri’s plea devoid of merit.

A day after the dismissal, a Gujarat anti-terror squad (ATS) team took activist Teesta Setalvad into custody for allegedly giving false information about the Gujarat riots.

Also Read | Who is Teesta Setalvad?

Setalvad has been booked under sections 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating), 471 (using forged documents as genuine), 194 (giving or fabricating false evidence with intent to procure conviction of a capital offence) and other relevant sections of the IPC.

In 2018, Jafri’s widow and activist Setalvad approached the top court, saying the SC-appointed SIT did not examine all the material available and its investigation was biased. They demanded that investigators themselves should face a probe.

A bench of Justices A M Khanwilkar, Dinesh Maheshwari and C T Ravikumar said “the SIT has not found any conspiracy, linking separate and disparate acts of arson and looting or outrageous claims made in sting operations or individual utterances/ publications of purported hate speech, to any singular larger conspiracy or planned event.”

The bench ruled: “The materials gathered during the investigation in no way link any ‘meeting of the minds’ in any of the nine cases investigated by the SIT or for that matter, other incidents alleged in the complaint or the protest petition. The riots across the state had taken place spontaneously, immediately after the Godhra train carnage.”

It said that “no material was discovered pointing towards any meeting of minds/ conspiracy in the higher echelons of the administration or (that) the political establishment conspired with other persons to cause such riots or (it) turned a Nelson’s eye when the riots had triggered and continued.”

The court also said the SIT probe has “fully exposed” the “falsity of claims” made by “disgruntled officials” of Gujarat “to create sensation by making revelations which were false” and said that “all those involved in such abuse of process, need to be in the dock.”

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In its ruling, the apex court said that “no fault can be found with the approach of the SIT in submitting the final report…which is backed by firm logic, expositing analytical mind and dealing with all aspects objectively for discarding the allegations regarding larger criminal conspiracy (at the highest level) for causing and precipitating mass violence across the state against the minority community during the relevant period.”