On Sunday, Pillai had sparked a row after he told Times Now that P Chidambaram – when he was home minister – got Ishrat Jahan’s link with Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) dropped from an affidavit filed in the Supreme Court in August 2009.

P Chidambaram has even owned up to the charges, saying they are “absolutely correct.”

Now, RVS Mani, former under secretary (Internal Security) in the Union home ministry, has told Times Now in an interview that “he was used as a rubber stamp by the government”.

Mani said he was ordered to sign on the second affidavit, and that the special investigation team (SIT) wanted him to implicate the Gujarat Intelligence Bureau officers.

Mani alleged that he was tortured by SIT chief Satish Verma to implicate senior IB officials in the case to project the encounter killing of Ishrat and other three LeT terrorists in Ahmedabad in 2004 as fake.

“The SIT chief burnt me with cigarette stubs. I was chased by a CBI officer,” he said.

Watch the interview here:

The interview had triggered a war of words between the BJP and the Congress over the alleged flip-flop on the affidavits in the Ishrat Jahan encounter case. The BJP is accusing the Congress of having attempted to frame Narendra Modi and Amit Shah in the sensational encounter killing and demanding a probe into the issue.

Hitting back, Congress charged the BJP with spreading false propaganda merely to score political points and wondered if the Modi government was intervening in the case to block the prosecution of guilty policemen.

On Tuesday evening, the BJP called an emergency media and fielded Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, who alleged that Chidambaram did it on the directions of the Congress high command to frame the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and his ministerial colleague Amit Shah, who was then Minister of State for Home.

With inputs from PTI