The Maharashtra police and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), probing the murders of Govind Pansare, veteran CPI leader, and Narendra Dabholkar, writer, respectively, recently came to Bengaluru to interrogate two of the accused in the Gauri Lankesh case: Amol Kale, 39, who hails from Pune where Dabholkar was shot, and Amit Degwekar, 39, from Goa.
Sources in the Special Investigation Team said that they suspected Kale played a key role in the murder of Gauri and the plot to kill Mysuru-based professor K.S. Bhagavan. Investigators probing the Dabholkar murder have evidence linking him to Veerendra Tawde and Sarang Akolkar, the two accused in that case. Degwekar, known to have links with Sanatan Sanstha, is a close associate of Kale. “Forensic and ballistic analysis indicate the country-made pistol used to kill Dabholkar in 2013 was one of the two pistols used to kill Pansare in February 2015. One, out of those two pistols, was used to kill M.M. Kalburgi in 2015 and Gauri Lankesh in 2017. This clearly indicates the same larger network of individuals behind all the four murders,” said an SIT source. However, the agencies are yet to recover any of the two weapons and the accused have feigned ignorance of their whereabouts, the police said.
Meanwhile, the Karnataka police have failed to get any lead on the murder of Kalburgi from the accused.
Investigators believe that Kale has been active since 2009 and took on a larger role after Tawde and the others were arrested in June 2016. “Agencies have evidence to show that Kale received intense training in planning and arms shooting since 2014 in Pune and Goa, leading to the suspicion that he may have taken on a key role in 2016,” a senior SIT sleuth said. According to sources here, the Maharashtra police and the CBI teams have taken copies of diaries and other material evidence recovered from Kale and Degwekar. The diaries have code names which are yet to be deciphered. However one such code indicated the word ‘Pansare’, which led the SIT to alert their counterparts in Maharashtra, sources said. The SIT had also seized material from two of the other accused in the Gauri case: Manohar Edave from Vijayapura and Sujith Kumar alias Praveen from Shivamogga. The content is in Kannada.
“We are getting it translated into English. Once that is done, we will provide them as well to our counterparts,” said an SIT official.
