Ishrat Jahan Encounter Case - The Victims

The Victims

Ishrat Jahan Shamim Raza

Ishrat Jahan (1985 – 15 June, 2004) was a second year Bachelor of Science student at Mumbai's Guru Nanak Khalsa College. She was the second of 7 siblings. Her lower middle class family, hailing from Bihar, lived in the Rashid compound in the Muslim-dominated area of Mumbra in Thane district in Mumbai. Having lost her father Shamim two years before her own death, Ishrat taught tuition and did embroidery work to support her family. Ishrat’s father Mohammad Shamim Raza was the proprietor of a Mumbai-based construction company called Asian Constructions while mother Shamima worked for a long time at a medicine packaging company in Vashi.

Ishrat had been hired by Javed Sheikh (also killed in the "encounter") to do some accounts-related work in his (unlocated) office at Pune for which he used to pay decent money. Whenever Ishrat came back to her home in Mumbai, she would hand over some money to her mother and tell her that the family's problems will be over once she finished her studies and got a permanent job.

Pranesh Pillai (alias Javed Gulam Sheikh)

Pranesh Pillai was the son of Gopinatha Pillai, a native of Noornad in Kerala. He was married to Sajida, and had three children, including a daughter.

Pranesh had migrated to Mumbai in search of a job. Before his death, he had been booked for four assault cases in Mumbai and Pune, and had also been charged with involvement in a fake currency racket. In the mid-1990s, he converted to Islam and changed his name to Javed Sheikh to marry a Muslim woman called Sajida. Gujarat Police recovered two passports from Javed: one obtained using his original name Pranesh and the second one in his new name.

Ishrat's family first time met Javed Sheikh just two months before her death. He had taken Ishrat to Nasik, Bangalore and Lucknow, where he is believed to have met Amjad.

Amjad Ali Rana

Amjad Ali Rana, also known as Akbar or Salim, was allged to be a Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorist from Haveli Diwan, Pakistan. He was reportedly found dead with an AK-56 rifle near his body. Amjad is believed to have met Javed several times in Oman, and also Javed and Ishrat in Ibrahimpur once. Amjad introduced Ishrat and Javed to Zeeshan, the fourth victim.

Zeeshan Johar

Zeeshan (alias Jisan Johar alias Abdul Ghani Son of Kalu alias Janbaaz), along with Amjad, is said to have been caught in a trespassing case in Srinagar in 2003. Nobody claimed the bodies of Amjad and Zeeshan after the encounter. An identity card with a Pakistan address was reportedly recovered from Zeeshan's dead body. However, a later report by the metropolitan magistrate SP Tamang stated that identity cards were forged by the police and the two men were Indian citizens, although it did not give any evidence on this.