SIT says crime carried out by ‘organised syndicate’

BENGALURU: In its first official statement on the investigation into the murder of journalist Gauri Lankesh, who was gunned down at her house on September 5 last year, the special investigation team probing the case said on Saturday that the crime was carried out by an organised crime syndicate.

The statement, issued late in the day, comes a day after the agency filed an additional charge sheet in which it has accused 18 people, two of whom are still missing, of being involved in the conspiracy, either directly or indirectly. The accused have been charged under the Karnataka Control of Organised Crime Act.

The SIT had formed six teams to look at the various angles involved i n the case, and deployed two of these to parse through CCTV footage taken from Lankesh’s house, which had recorded the crime taking place. Eventually, the police interviewed around 2,500 persons.

“The first breakthrough in the case happened when the material objects recovered from the scene of crime were analysed at the State Forensic Science Laboratory, Bangalore. The forensic ballistic analysis established that the pistol used to murder Lankesh was the same pistol used to murder MM Kalburgi in Dharwad, Karnataka and Govind Pansare in Kolhapur, Maharashtra,” the SIT said.

And this, the SIT said, led it to the syndicate that was allegedly carrying out these murders.

The syndicate was formed in 2010-11 by Virendra Tawade, who was arrested for alleged involvement in the murder of Narendra Dabholkar. “One former editor of Sanatan Prabhat provided financial support to this Syndicate,” the SIT said, referring to a publication brought out by the Sanatan Sanstha, a radical Hindu organisation.

However, the SIT has not directly named the organisation, except to say that its members “strictly followed the guidelines and principles mentioned in ‘Kshatra Dharma Sadhana’, a book published by Sanatan Sanstha”.

According to the SIT, the important members of the syndicate are Amol Kale, who allegedly took over the organisation after Tawade’s arrest, Amit Degvekar, Vikas Patil and Rushikesh Deodikar.

These four, the SIT said, recruited all the other accused and were the masterminds behind the murder.