Police arrest 6th accused in Gauri Lankesh murder
BENGALURU:THE special investigation team (SIT) probing the murder of journalist Gauri Lankesh arrested a 26-year-old man on Monday, the sixth person in the case so far, an official said.
Parashuram Wagmare was produced before the additional chief metropolitan magistrate’s court in the city on Tuesday, and has been remanded in 14 days of police custody.
Wagmare hails from Sindagi town in Vijayapura district runs a mobile phone store in the town, a senior official of the SIT said.
The official added that Wagmare’s role in the conspiracy was yet to be confirmed. “We have only received his custody on Tuesday and we will have to interrogate him and corroborate his statements with other evidence before confirming his role in the conspiracy,” he said.
Lankesh was gunned down outside her house on September 5 last year, with the forensic science laboratory confirming that the gun used to murder Kannada scholar MM Kalburgi was the one used to kill Lankesh.
The SIT’S biggest breakthrough in the case was the arrest of KT Naveen Kumar, a resident of Birur in Chickamagaluru district. Based on Kumar’s confession and other evidence gathered by the SIT, four other accused were later arrested.
In his confession, Kumar has said that he was roped into the conspiracy by one Praveen, who has also been arrested.
Praveen was a member of a radical Hindu group.
While Kumar said he did not provide the weapon for the murder, he had been active in a separate conspiracy to kill the rationalist KS Bhagwan.
The SIT initially arrested Kumar in relation to Bhagwan’s murder, a conspiracy senior SIT officials confirmed was in the final stages of execution. In that case, too, Kumar had been approached by Praveen, allegedly based on his effectiveness in the plot to murder Lankesh.
However, on Tuesday, the police released a report by the Directorate of Forensic Science in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, which says that Kumar had denied any role in the murder of Lankesh.
Kumar was taken to Gandhinagar for polygraph and other tests, but he refused permission just before it was to be conducted.
The report says that Kumar only knew of Lankesh as a reporter and that his interest in her was only out of curiosity. “After the murder, he started taking interest in the case. When police took him to her house, it was then he learnt about it.”
Moreover, the report adds, Kumar had never spoken about Lankesh to anybody else and that he did not have “any feelings towards her, either of happiness or sadness”, and claimed that he was under “mental pressure”.
According to the report, he was not a “big Hindu” and did not plan to murder Bhagwan either.
However, in his statement to the FSL in Gujarat, Kumar said he did know Praveen, who he met at a function in Bengaluru. “He told clearly that Praveen asked him once very casually (if) he could arrange a gun for him and he agreed. But he never provided the gun to him,” it said.