The CBI chargesheet in the June 2004 encounter of four alleged terrorists in Ahmedabad, filed in the Gujarat high court on Wednesday, was expected to be explosive. It was not.

Speculations were rife that the agency, allegedly under the pressure from the Congress-lead central government, would name chief minister Narendra Modi and the then minister of state for home Amit Shah in the chargesheet. They have not been named.

However, the chargesheet did finally point to the role the Intelligence Bureau (IB) played in the controversial killings of the four who, it was then alleged, had come to kill Modi to extract revenge for the 2002 riots. It was IB that gave the intelligence inputs to the state police leading to the extra-judicial killings, says the chargesheet, which also names six Gujarat police officers.

The agency has said it will file a supplementary chargesheet on the motive behind the killings -- a move that is interpreted as leaving open the option of cornering Modi and Shah later.

The agency has also presented a detailed chronology of the much-debated encounter in which a teenage girl from Mumbai, Ishrat Jahan, was also killed early in the morning on the outskirts of the city.

The chargesheet says the FIR filed after the encounter had in fact been drafted much before the incident. It also says that the weapons used in the incident were provided to the police by the IB.