Ahmedabad, Sep 8 - The Gujarat government Tuesday maintained that Mumbai collegian Ishrat Jahan and three of her friends killed in a 2004 shootout were terrorists and said it would challenge a report of a metropolitan magistrate that said the police shot them in cold blood.

A day after the report by Ahmedabad metropolitan magistrate S.P. Tamang that the police faked it all as a firefight, state government spokesperson and cabinet minister Jay Narayan Vyas told reporters that the inquiry report was 'bad in law and so the state government will challenge it'.

The government also maintained that the four were Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) operatives who had been tasked to kill Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and organise terror attacks in India -- something the police team involved in the crime had all along claimed.

He said this was because the sections of the criminal procedure code used in the inquiry were not tenable with the case.

Vyas wondered how could the magistrate proceed with an inquiry in the case when there was already a high-level police investigation ordered by the Gujarat High Court on the very day -- Aug 13, 2009, -- that had been given time till Nov 30 this year.

He said: 'Justice Tamang's report is bad in law, and it overstepped to an extent because the high court had already ordered a high-level inquiry in it. It was prudent that he had not proceeded with the inquiry.'

'But he had to, what was such a tearing hurry that 13th August you start the investigation and also concluded it by September 7th,' Vyas wondered.

On June 15, 2004, Ishrat from Mumbra in Thane district and three of her friends, Javed Ghulam Sheikh alias Pranesh Kumar Pillai, Amjad Ali alias Rajkumar Akbar Ali Rana and Jisan Johar Abdul Gani, were shot dead by Ahmedabad Police's Crime Branch (Detection) on the outskirts of the city.

Police claimed that the four were members of a Lashkar-e-Taiba module and were on a mission to kill Chief Minister Narendra Modi.