NEW DELHI, Sept. 18 (Xinhua) -- India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief Amit Shah Monday deposed in a special court that summoned him last week as a defense witness in a riots case in the western state of Gujarat in 2002.
The court in Gujarat had asked Shah to appear before it either in person or through a lawyer on a request by Maya Kodnani, a former BJP minister who has been sentenced to life in jail, in one of the several Gujarat riots cases that claimed the lives of a number of Muslims.
In his testimony, the BJP chief told the court that Kodnani, who is accused of killing 11 Muslims during the 2002 riots in Naroda Gam, a suburb of Gujarat's financial city of Ahmedabad, was not present at the spot at the time of the incident.
"Maya Kodnani was not present in Naroda Gam, she was inside the state assembly at 8:30 a.m., from 9:30 a.m. to 9:45 a.m. I was at the Civil Hospital and I met Maya Kodnani there," Shah told the court.
Kodnani, who is currently out on bail on health grounds, had earlier claimed the same before the court and asked it to summon Shah as a defense witness in the case.
Kodnani was a BJP lawmaker at the time of the riots but later served as minister for women and child development in Gujarat led by then Chief Minister and now Prime Minister Narendra Modi, till she was arrested in 2009.
Modi's critics accuse him of keeping mum during the 2002 Gujarat riots in which over 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were massacred by Hindu mobs. Modi denies any wrongdoing and has never been convicted in a court of law.
