NEW DELHI, Dec 22: India's rebellious news portal Tehelka. com gave a new twist on Wednesday to a notorious massacre of Muslims during the February-March 2002 Gujarat pogrom , showing in a film that the key witness had turned hostile after she was bribed by rightwing Hindus.

A spycam video details how Ms Zaheera Sheikh and her family negotiated with Bahartiya Janata party (BJP) lawmaker Madhu Srivastava. At a crowded screening of the expose, Tehelka showed how it had captured Mr Srivastava admitting he paid an amount of Rs1800,000 to Zaheera, to change her testimony in court in May 2003.

That was when Ms Zaheera Sheikh originally turned hostile by claiming that she knew nothing about the violence in the controversial case. She has rubbished Tehelka's claims that she took money to change her statements. Faced with the same question of whether or not she was giving false evidence in return for cash, Zaheera didn't have a direct reply in court.

All she said was, "Whatever I speak in court is the truth, after death I have to face Allah. How can I lie ?" For Teesta Setalvad, the social activist who sought to help Zaheera but was accused of intimidating her to give false evidence, the latest revelation has only heightened the importance of judicial intervention in the Best Bakery and other Gujarat riot cases.

In her first reaction to Wednesday's events, Ms Setalvad said that she would wait to see how the allegations impact the legal case. Zaheera had alleged that it was Teesta who was forcing her to change her testimony.

Zaheera is the key witness in the Best Bakery case but has made a series of flip-flops in her statements to the court. The controversial case, in which 14 people were burned alive on March 1, 2002, is being re-tried in Mumbai.

So far, the retrial is delicately poised between two sets of witnesses. On the one side Zaheera and her family - five key witnesses who have turned hostile. On the other side five witnesses, four of them bakery workers and Zaheera's sister-in-law Yasmin, who have stood by the prosecution's case.

India's ruling Congress party was quick to react and claimed that the film exposed the true face of the BJP. "We were always aware of their intentions but we did not know the extent to which they were willing to go to hide the truth.

The SC court should take strict notice of this incident," said Congress spokesman Anand Sharma. The BJP has hit back saying that the whole episode smacks of a conspiracy by the Congress.