The Maharashtra police have detained four more persons, including a woman, in connection with the murder of CPI leader Govind Pansare. Already right-wing activist Sameer Gaikwad has been arrested in connection with the case. The arrests have turned the focus on the activities of Sanatan Sanstha.
The woman, believed to be Gaikwad’s girlfriend, was detained in Mumbai on Thursday based on a tap on his mobile phone. The accused allegedly boasted to his girlfriend how he had done Pansare in. The woman, also a member of the Sanstha, was brought to Sangli for questioning on Friday.
The Special Investigation Team (SIT) seized about 23 cellphones during a raid on Gaikwad’s house at Sangli. The police also recovered a sharp weapon and sheaves of propaganda pamphlets glorifying the Sanstha’s role as a defender of Hinduism.
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“As of now, he [Gaikwad] has refused to co-operate. We have handed over the phones to a team of the Pune cyber crime branch for further probe,” said SIT chief Sanjay Kumar. A team of experts from the Gujarat police too would be arriving to do a Voice Layered Analysis (VLA) on Gaikwad’s phone transcripts.
While Gaikwad’s arrest, the first in nearly seven months since the 81-year-old Pansare was shot dead outside his home in Kolhapur, has been hailed as a breakthrough, the investigation agencies have much less to go by in terms of circumstantial evidence.
According to sources, the probe agencies have begun to home in on the activities of Rudra Patil of Sangli, who is said to be Gaikwad’s friend. Patil, along with Dilip Akolkar of Pune, was among the 12 charged by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in the 2009 Madgaon blast case. Both Patil and Akolkar are absconding.
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Kalburgi case Meanwhile, a special team from the Karnataka Criminal Investigation Department (CID), which is probing the murder of rationalist and Kannada writer M.M. Kalburgi is in Sangli, waiting for its turn to question the three arrested Sanatan Sanstha activists.
H.C. Kishore Chandra, Director-General, CID, said they were closely working with the investigators of Dhabolkar and Pansare murders as there were many similarities in the cases. “Our team is in Sangli and we are in constant touch with the SIT. We will question the three suspects in connection with the Kalburgi murder case,” he said.
The arrests in the Pansare murder case had infused new hope in a probe that had almost hit a dead end. With two of the three suspects being picked up from Sankeshwar town in Belagavi, the CID and the Internal Security Division (ISD) are monitoring the case closely.
Following the arrest of Sameer Gaikwad from Sangli, the SIT probing the death of Pansare, on Thursday detained Sridhar Vijay Jadhav, 23, and Sushil Vijay Jadhav, 20, both brothers-in-law of Gaikwad, from Sankeshwar. Shridhar, who studied up to PUC, is running a bicycle shop, while his younger brother Sushil works in an automobile garage in Sankeshwar. Vijay Jadhav, father of the two youths, claimed that his sons were innocent.
Sameer Gaikwad also hails from Sankeshwar and had shifted to Sangli, Maharashtra, 20 years ago. A senior ISD official said the Sanatan Sanstha was under the scanner in Karnataka for the past few years.