The Bombay High Court on Thursday noted that there should be a dedicated team with the mindset to find the accused in Govind Pansare and Narendra Dabholkar murder cases. A Division Bench of Justices S.C. Dharmadhikari and M.S. Karnik said the investigating agencies should have a dedicated team that should be given proper training to find the accused.
The court was hearing petitions filed by members of the Pansare and Dabholkar families. The CBI Special Investigation Team (SIT) is investigating Dabholkar murder and the State Criminal Investigation Department is probing Pansare murder.
After perusing the report submitted by the SIT, the court said, it was focusing on what the Karnataka government was doing with respect to the Gauri Lankesh murder and it showed that they were way ahead of us. The court said that in Karnataka the murder took place much later than the ones here and still they were ahead of us in investigation.
The court said, “You are questioning the accused in another case in Karnataka, but the report does not reveal what the actual measures you are taking to arrest the absconding accused.”
The Bench said, “You cannot rely completely on the revelations made by the accused in another case. How long will this go on? You have to conduct an independent probe, gather some independent material.”
The CBI had not submitted its rudimentary report and the court was to summon Joint Directors of the agencies and the Principal Secretary of the State. However, CBI counsel and Additional Solicitor General Anil Singh requested the court not to do so.
The court then told both the agencies to make sincere efforts in tracing the absconding accused and adjourned the matter to Febraury 6.
In the last hearing, after perusing both the reports, the court had said, “This leads us to ask the CBI if there is any deliberate attempt to dilute, slow down or tone down its probe against some persons.”
