The court also came down heavily on the Centre for adopting a causal approach in the sensitive case.
The court appointed J V Ramudu, an Andhra Pradesh cadre IPS officer, to the post on Friday, after the Centre assured the court that his consent has been taken for the job.
However, Ramudu refused to take up the job due to health reasons and informed the court that his consent in the matter was not sought.
The Centre on Tuesday through Assistant Solicitor General Pankaj Champanari moved an application in the court of Justice Jayant Patel and Abhilasha Kumari, giving updates on Ramudu’s denial and suggested new names for his replacement.
Previously Karnail Singh, Satyapal Singh and JV Ramudu had opted out of the probe panel, citing their own reasons.
The SIT also includes Mohan Jha and Satish Verma, both IPS officers of the Gujarat cadre.
In a statement released within hours of the high court hearing, the home ministry said it had included Ramudu’s name after consultations with the state governments concerned.
“Neither the state government of Andhra Pradesh nor the officer himself had brought to the notice of MHA the inability of the officer to be a part of SIT, although his name had been indicated in the High Court’s order in May, 2011,” the home ministry statement said, adding it was informed about the officer’s health problems only after his name had been communicated to the high court.
Ishrat, along with three others — Javed Sheikh alias Pranesh Pillai, Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar — was killed in a police encounter on June 15, 2004. After the encounter, city crime branch had claimed that the deceased were Lashkar-e-Tayiba terrorists who had come to kill Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
Probe in the case is being supervised directly by the Gujarat High Court, which had constituted the SIT last year to investigate genuineness of the encounter after petitions filed by Ishrat’s mother Shamima Kausar and Gopinath Pillai, father of Javed Sheikh.