Making its first arrest in the Ishrat Jahan encounter case, CBI took into custody an IPS officer G L Singhal who led the crime branch team which killed the 19-year-old Mumbai girl in an encounter in Gujarat eight years ago which was found to be allegedly fake.

CBI sources here said today that Singhal who is now the SP with State Crime Bureau was not cooperating with the agency prompting it to take him into custody for further examination. The CBI was handed over the probe in December 2011.

They said the agency also carried out searches at the official and residential premises of Singhal.

The sources said five more people have been questioned in connection with the encounter which was found to be fake by the Special Investigation Team(SIT) constituted on the directions of the Gujarat High Court.

The court had asked the agency to submit a progress report by March 15.

The sources said Singhal, who was inducted from State Police Services into IPS in 2001, was ACP crime branch in 2004 and instrumental in the alleged orchestration of encounter in which Jahan along with Javed Sheikh, Zeeshan Johar and Amjad Ali Rana were killed on an empty road stretch between Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar on June 15, 2004.

It was claimed by the police that they were part of the conspiracy to assassinate Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

After Jahan's mother complained about the alleged fake encounter, Gujarat High Court constituted a Special Investigation Team(SIT) which concluded that encounter was fake.

Following the report, the High Court handed over the case to the CBI on December one, 2011 and it is monitoring the investigations. More

In the FIR filed by SIT chief Rajiva Ranjan Verma before the CBI, it was alleged that IPS officer D G Vanzara asked Singhal to work on the purported intelligence input about movement of Ishrat Jahan but he "had apparently done no specific work regarding it."

The FIR had alleged that entries made in the weekly diaries of Singhla combined with other documentary evidence "provide grounds to be believe that they might be involved in the prior custody of the deceased persons."

The FIR mentions that there were gross anomalies in the description given by the crime branch about the alleged encounter and highlighted that trajectory of the bullets was downward inclined which is possible from positions close to the car in which Jahan was travelling.

It says Jahan who was a student of second year B.Sc did not have any past criminal record.

Recommending to book the officers involved in the encounter under stringent provisions of murder, SIT has said purported encounter as stated by police in its FIR is not genuine and it implies "that the right of private defence for causing defence for causing death of the four deceased persons does not legally accrue to the concerned police officers."