New Delhi, Aug. 30: The Narendra Modi government has picked former CBI chief R.K. Raghavan, who led a probe that cleared then chief minister Modi of complicity in the 2002 Gujarat riots, as high commissioner to Cyprus in its first political appointment to India's diplomatic establishment.

Unlike its predecessors, the Modi government had so far avoided political appointments to ambassadorial positions, earning the Prime Minister much goodwill within the Indian Foreign Service. With Raghavan, it has decided to make a departure from practice.

Raghavan, 76, who retired in 2001 as director of India's premier investigation agency, has over his career investigated multiple high-profile cases.

In 2005, the Supreme Court had appointed him head of a panel mandated to recommend a road map to check ragging on campuses. The blueprint Raghavan's team prepared has since become India's anti-ragging policy, endorsed by the apex court.

But Raghavan left a far deeper political imprint in his role as head of a Supreme Court-appointed special investigation team (SIT) that probed the Gujarat riots after allegations of bias against the state police. Under Raghavan, the SIT succeeded in securing convictions in almost every case it took to trial.

But in the case relating to Modi, it said in 2012 that it had found no evidence to back allegations that the then chief minister had done nothing to stop some of the worst massacres in 2002, such as the Gulbarga Society carnage. The court accepted the SIT findings.

In 2008, the apex court had asked a Raghavan-headed SIT to investigate allegations by Zakia Jafri, wife of former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri, relating to the attack on the Gulbarga Society. Ehsan was one of 69 people killed in the Muslim-majority neighbourhood.

Zakia insisted that when the mob attacked the gated society, her husband had telephoned Modi's office and sought his assistance. But Modi told the SIT that he had come to know of the Gulbarga Society massacre several hours after the attack.

It was after that exoneration that the BJP projected Modi as its prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 general election. Critics of Raghavan's work have accused the SIT of playing down evidence against Modi.

It was under Raghavan that the CBI had probed Indian cricket's biggest scandal, the April 2000 match-fixing case that ended the careers of cricketers Mohammad Azharuddin and Ajay Jadeja.

Raghavan was also in charge of the investigations into the 1996 rape and murder of Priyadarshini Mattoo, a law student. After a 1999 acquittal, the Supreme Court in 2010 eventually convicted Santosh Kumar Singh, son of an inspector-general of police.