A year on, no headway in Dabholkar murder case

PUNE: A year after anti-superstition crusader Narendra Dabholkar (in pic) was murdered in Pune, investigators have hit a dead-end.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which has been probing the case for the past three months, has maintained that cases such as this one are not easy to crack, especially as it came to the agency months after the incident took place on August 20, 2013.

After the local police had failed to arrest the assailants, the case was transferred to the investigating agency. “The CBI took over the case in June 2014. We are still in the initial stages of invesspokesperson, told HT.

To protest against the delay in cracking the case, various organisations will conduct rallies in Pune and other parts of the state on Wednesday.

Dabholkar’s family and activists, however, are worried the probe may meet the same fate as RTI activist Suresh Shetty’s murder. “We are concerned about the probe, especially after Shetty’s case was closed by the CBI,” said Hamid Dabholkar, his son. The CBI had, last week, filed a closure report citing the absence of adequate prosecutable evidence in Shetty’s murder, four years after unidentified assailants shot him down at his hometown Talegaon Dabhade.

“Through all of last year, no legislator asked any questions in

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Are questions being suppressed deliberately?” said Hamid.

According to many senior police officers, crucial links in the case may have now gone cold, as suspects got enough time to cover their tracks.

Although the police had formed 21 teams to scrutinise two crore phone calls and the footage from 110 CCTV cameras, they made no headway.

“It’s too premature to say if the links have gone cold. The CBI is investigating the case as per