AHMEDABAD: The three senior IPS officers, including D.G. Vanzara, arrested in connection with the fake encounter case, were sent to judicial custody on Tuesday.

The three junior police personnel, arrested on Monday, were produced before Chief Judicial Magistrate K.J. Upadhyaya at the metropolitan court here, and remanded to seven-day police custody.

The court deferred a decision on the Gujarat CID (Crime Branch) request for narcoanalysis, brain mapping and other tests on the IPS officers at the Forensic Science Laboratory in Gandhinagar, and fixed May 25 as the next date of hearing on the application.

Special arrangements have been made at the high-security Sabarmati Central Jail near here to lodge Mr. Vanzara and Superintendents of Police, Rajkumar Pandian of the Gujarat cadre and M.N. Dinesh of the Rajasthan cadre.

According to the Intelligence Bureau, it had received information that the IPS officers, particularly Mr. Vanzara, faced a threat to their lives from those detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA).

The Sabarmati jail houses more than 200 held under POTA, and also those facing trial in the Godhra train carnage case, the attack on the Swaminarayan temple, the murder of the former Minister of State for Home, Haren Pandya, and the serial tiffin box bomb explosions case.

Many of them were arrested by Mr. Vanzara when he headed the Anti-Terrorist Squad and Mr Pandian was his deputy.

The police sought 14-day remand for constable Ajay Parmar, the former personal attaché to Mr. Pandian; constable Santram Sharma, who drove the car in which the ATS team went to Hyderabad to bring Sohrabuddin and Kausarbi back to Ahmedabad; and inspector N.H. Dabhi, who is claimed to have fired three shots at Sohrabuddin during the fake encounter. The court, however, granted only seven-day remand.

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