NO ONE KILLED MAHANTESH
Police are yet to decide if the murder of a government official was a land mafia hit or due to personal enmity
The security cameras that should have witnessed his murder and identified his killers were on the blink. The murder happened in a high security zone, where the chief justice of Karnataka lives, but no one knew. There was a single witness, who has since vanished.
Still, the Bangalore Police claim to have multiple leads into the murder of Karnataka’s deputy director of cooperative audit, S. P. Mahantesh, 48, who was bludgeoned to death with iron rods on the rain- hit evening of May 15. A Maruti Omni reportedly carrying four assailants is said to have halted Mahantesh, who was driving home in his Maruti 800. The assailants dragged him out and beat him before fleeing. Mahantesh died five days later, never regaining consciousness.
The police are looking at whether it was a land mafia hit or a private affair gone horribly wrong. The police claim to have found soft porn CDs and photographs in Mahantesh’s house, which they say point to an extramarital relationship between him and a young girl. They further claim that the young girl had many protectors and Mahantesh could have been the target of those. Mahantesh’s family and friends strongly deny this. His wife Purnima and mother Vijayamma say he was repeatedly threatened over phone and by some motorcycle- borne people over the past few months. Former chief minister B. S. Yeddyurappa alleged in a May 21 letter to Home Minister R. Ashoka: “I believe the land mafia, funded by the international fake currency cartel, was responsible for Mahantesh’s death.” Mahantesh belongs to Yeddyurappa’s community, the powerful Lingayats.
Everyone concurs that as deputy director of cooperative audit, Mahantesh was in a position to hinder the
“I believe the land mafia was responsible for Mahantesh’s death.” B. S. YEDDYURAPPA, Former Chief Minister
thriving land mafia in Bangalore. He had in his custody audit reports of how sites were allotted in the highly controversial Judicial Layout, Karnataka Telecom Society, the Shantinagar Housing Society and the more recent scandal that touched the PMO, the BEML housing society. “It is just a suspicion that Mahantesh could have made an attempt to point out violations in some audit reports and insisted on recording these violations,” Ganesh S. Koundinya, 49, an activist campaigning for clean- up in cooperative housing societies, told INDIA TODAY. “Irrespective of the results of the probe into Mahantesh’s death, the housing societies’ scam needs investigation by CBI,” he added.
The police are investigating the angle of whether Mahantesh tried to curry favour from some housing cooperative society in return for going soft on violations. But the police are unwilling or have been directed not to investigate this case only as a land mafia hit, as the style of the murder is “amateurish”. “We are looking at all angles,” says Ashoka.