14 police officers, including IPS officer G L Singhal, on Tuesday moved the Gujarat High Court seeking transfer of the probe to Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) or Special Investigation Team that has members other than those from Gujarat Police.

They alleged in their petition that senior IPS official Satish Verma, who has been given full charge of investigation into the encounter case by the high court, was working in connivance with certain IPS officers having personal score to settle with them.

The probe into 2004 encounter case in which four persons were killed, is at present being conducted by Satish Verma headed special investigation team (SIT) on the order of the Gujarat high court.

The police officials have filed an urgent appeal before the bench of Justice Jayant Patel and Justice Abhilasha Kumari but the bench refused to treat it as urgent and listed it for hearing on May 4.

Verma was handed over the full charge after his seniors in the SIT tried to prevent him from investigating the case by getting complaints registered against him. The complainants from the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) had alleged that Verma had misbehaved and threatened them while raiding their offices to collect CDs and other documents containing photographs of the scene of encounter.

The complainants alleged that Verma might use ‘coercive’ steps against them and ‘extra-legal’ methods to implicate them in the case.

Ishrat Jahan, Javed Pillai and two others were shot dead on the outskirts of Ahmedabad city in 2004 and police officials involved had described the incident as an encounter. They were alleged to be Lashkar-e-Toiba operatives.

The cops who have moved the high court are:G L Singhal( IPS), K M Vaghela, R I Patel, Tarun Barot-all deputy superintendent of police, J G Parmar (retired DySP), H Goswami , B A Chavda, K S Desai , C J Goswami -all police inspectors, M T Vyas and N B Saiyyed, M N Menat ,B R Bharwad and A J Chowdhary-all constables.