Dabholkar-Pansare murders: Use technology to track down accused, Bombay HC tells agencies | Mumbai news - Hindustan Times
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Dabholkar-Pansare murders: Use technology to track down accused, Bombay HC tells agencies

Hindustan Times | By, Mumbai
Aug 24, 2017 01:14 AM IST

The judges said the agencies should track down “the money trail” to reach the duo.

The Bombay high court on Wednesday said that the investigating agencies should use modern methods in their attempts to trace two suspects involved in the murders of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar and CPI leader Govind Pansare. 

(HT File)
(HT File)

After perusing reports submitted by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the state Special Investigation Team (SIT), the division bench of justice SC Dharmadhikari and justice Vibha Kankanwadi said that keeping track of relatives and close friends of the two absconding accused in Dr. Narendra Dabholkar murder case was not the only way to track them. 

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“These persons have firm roots in the society,” said the bench while hearing petitions filed by the family members of the deceased. “They must be getting financial support and funding, otherwise, it would be impossible for a person to continue to hide for such a long period,” it added. 

“This (murder) is not an act committed by a person or two,” said the bench, adding that, “The reports indicate that this is a completely organised set up.” Judges said the investigating agencies should try to track down the financial support and the funding in their pursuit of the two wanted accused. 

Special counsel for the state, Ashok Mundargi, responded saying that the accused must have some backing. “Backing has to be there, in fact there must be a solid back up,” he said and added that the investigating machinery will employ all the resources to track them down once the agencies zero down on their whereabouts. 

However, the bench insisted that “You will have to trace their financial support and funding... every bank, ATMs,” the judges added. The judges said the agencies should track down “the money trail” in order to reach the absconding duo - Sarang Akolkar and Vinay Pawar, who according to the CBI gunned down Dabholkar, a prominent anti-superstition crusader. 

Dabholkar was shot dead in Pune on August 20, 2013, while Pansare was shot in Kolhapur on February 16, 2015 and succumbed to his injuries four days later. While the CBI is probing the Dabholkar murder, a special investigating team of the state police is investigating killing of the CPI leader. 

Petitioner’s counsel, advocate Abhay Nevagi, complained that “the investigating agencies had made mockery of the law”. He pointed out that more than four years have passed after Dr. Dabholkar was killed and two-and-half years after Pansare’s killing, but still the investigating agencies are headed nowhere. 

“This court has spent 22 hours hearing these petitions and the orders passed by this court now run beyond 100 pages and the investigating agencies are filing one status report after the other,” said Nevagi urged the court to make some senior bureaucrat responsible for the probe in the high-profile murder cases, and unless that was done situation will not improve. 

The court has now asked him to put his grievances on an affidavit in two weeks.

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