Bhatt in an Ahmedabad court on Saturday. (PTI)

Ahmedabad, Oct. 1: Gujarat IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt, who has accused chief minister Narendra Modi of inaction in the 2002 Gujarat riots, was today remanded in judicial custody for 15 days after a court rejected a plea for police remand.

The police had asked for a seven-day custody of the officer who was arrested yesterday.

Earlier in the day, Bhatt’s wife Sweta had written to the state police chief and the Ahmedabad police commissioner saying she feared for her husband’s life. Sweta was also not allowed to meet Bhatt this morning.

The police officer is accused of forcing a constable, K.D. Pant, to file a false affidavit claiming he had seen Bhatt at the chief minister’s bungalow the night before the riots began. Bhatt had told the apex court last April that at the meeting, Modi had asked the police to let “Hindus vent their anger”.

Modi and then state police chief K. Chakravarthy have denied that Bhatt, who was deputy commissioner with the state intelligence bureau then, was at the meeting.

The officer was suspended last month for going on “unauthorised leave”.

In the letter to the top police officers, Sweta wrote that she and her husband would “never get justice in Gujarat” as the atmosphere was so vitiated. At the time she wrote to director-general of police Chittaranjan Singh and Ahmedabad police chief Sudhir Sinha, Bhatt was in the custody of the crime branch.

Sweta wrote the crime branch officers “are encounter specialists”. “I can’t trust them at all. I fear for his life.”

Bhatt’s residence at Memnagar was raided this afternoon — the second time in two days.

His lawyer I.H. Saiyed said in court that the police arrested Bhatt on September 30 because after that the court would be shut for a 10-day festival season holiday. This was done “so that I cannot approach the apex court”, he said.

Four days back, the suspended IPS officer had also filed an affidavit in Gujarat High Court saying he had “documentary evidence implicating some politicians and the police in the murder of former home minister Haren Pandya”.

The purpose of Bhatt’s arrest, said Saiyed, was to “seize the documentary evidence and destroy them”. They are trying to turn him into a witness, Saiyed said.