AHMEDABAD, June 18: The mother of a 19-year-old Indian Muslim woman gunned down this week demanded a federal probe on Friday into police claims that her daughter was assigned to kill Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

The ruling Congress party has accused the western state's right-wing government of orchestrating the shootout in a bid to stay in power after a reprimand from former premier Atal Behari Vajpayee.

A distraught Shamima Jahan Sheikh went to Gujarat's commercial hub of Ahmedabad on Friday to claim her daughter, Ishrat Jahan's bullet-ridden body but was first interrogated for more than an hour by the police.

"My daughter was innocent and not involved in any terrorist activity as is alleged by the (police) crime branch," said Shamima Sheikh, who is from the adjoining state of Maharashtra.

"The Indian government should order an enquiry by the Central Bureau of Investigation to get to the truth," she said. Police claimed Ishrat Jahan and three Muslim men, two of them Pakistanis, were killed on Tuesday as they set off with a stash of arms and explosives to kill Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

Sheikh said police "told me that my daughter is innocent and whatever happened to her was very wrong and that they would give us justice." But Gujarat police official D.G. Vanjara, who helped question Sheikh, denied her claims.

"She can say anything but we still stick to the stand that Ishrat was a terrorist," Vanjara said. "There is much more evidence but we would not like to reveal it. We will do it at an appropriate time."

The Communist Party of India, which backs Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's government, also called for a federal probe. "It was a stage-managed fake encounter to divert the attention from the controversies surrounding Modi," the party's leader A.B. Bardhan said.

Gopinathan Pillai, the father of Javed Khan, one of the three slain men, told reporters in his southern Indian home town of Trivandrum that he also doubted the claims of the Gujarat police.

Pillai said his Hindu son, who converted to Islam to wed a Muslim woman, was perhaps coerced to drive the car of the suspected militants as he was an "expert driver". "It is difficult for me to believe he was a terrorist," Pillai said of his son who worked as an electrician in Pune city of Maharashtra state.

Two days before the killing of Jahan and the three men, Vajpayee said his Bharatiya Janata Party would consider removing Modi in the backdrop of the Hindu nationalists' shock election defeat in April-May elections. -AFP