Ishrat Jahan was a Lashkar suicide bomber, David Headley tells court

Mumbai girl Ishrat Jahan was killed in an encounter by Gujarat police in 2004.

Deposing before a Mumbai court on Thursday, Pakistani-American terrorist David Coleman Headley said that Ishrat Jahan, 19-year-old Mumbai student killed in an encounter by Gujarat police in 2004, was a Lashkar-e-Taiba suicide bomber.

Headley said that there was a women's wing in the LeT. He claimed that the mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai attack, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi told him about a botched up operation of Muzammil in India.

"The operation was about shooting the police at some naka. One woman LeT named Ishrat Jahan was involved. Muzammil Bhatt was the head of our group before Sajid Mir," he told the court.

Ishrat Jahan, her friend Pranesh Pillai alias Javed Sheikh along with two suspected Pakistanis -- Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar -- were gunned down by Gujarat crime branch officials on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in 2004.

Police officials claimed that they were LeT terrorists who had planned to kill the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

An investigation was launched into the case after allegations that Ishrat was killed in a fake encounter and in 2009 an Ahmedabad Metropolitan court ruled that the encounter was staged.

The decision was challenged by the Gujarat government and matter was taken to the High Court.

The CBI, which took over probe from the Gujarat High Court appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT), had filed chargesheet in August 2013 saying that the encounter was fake and executed in the joint operation by the city crime branch and Subsidiary Intelligence Bureau (SIB).

The CBI had accused Gujarat police of staging the encounter in a joint operation with the state's intelligence bureau.

The CBI had said that Ishrat and others were in the custody of Gujarat Police before being killed and, in fact, she and Javed had been interrogated at a farmhouse on the outskirts of Ahmedabad where they were kept in confinement.

All the four were taken to the encounter spot near Kotarpur Waterworks blind-folded before being shot dead in cold blood, CBI had said.