The first step into probing the threat call to Minister of State for Youth Empowerment, Sports and Fisheries Abhayachandra Jain is to ascertain the genuineness of the caller, whether it was Ravi Poojary or not, said the police.
The police are likely to play voice samples of the underworld operative to the Minister to confirm the identity.
The details of the call’s origin have been passed on to the Cyber Crime Lab for technical analysis. Sources said it was a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) call, which is hard to trace.
Meanwhile, Home Minister K.J. George said some of the fugitive underworld operatives, in the wrong notion that the police cannot act against them, had turned audacious. “But with the arrest of Bannanje Raja, we have shown that such elements can be brought to book. Similar pursuit will follow other underworld operatives like Ravi Poojary as well,” he said.
Meanwhile, the police establishment feels that the call allegedly from Ravi Poojary marked a change in his activities in the region from extortion to “fishing in troubled waters”.
A senior official, who earlier served as IGP (Western Range), said that Ravi Poojary has no history of intervening in local communal disputes in the coastal belt and this call was a first of its kind for its political nature and audaciousness.
Ravi Poojary, presently suspected to be holed up in Australia, was a former associate of Chhota Rajan and is known to have made several statements against Dawood Ibrahim, in the garb of patriotism. However, police officials said that he was not known to be having close links with right-wing groups locally.
Former State Intelligence chief Gopal B. Hosur said the case clearly indicated that Ravi Poojary was trying to garner popularity in the communally divisive region.
Another police official said Ravi Poojary belongs to the same community as the murdered Bajrang Dal activist Prashanth Poojary, which may have prompted him to make that call to the Minister, after the BJP accused Mr. Jain of having links with the murder accused.
