‘They asked me if that was Yashwant Sonawane’
“We were going towards Nandgaon for a meeting that was planned. I was sitting in the seat next to the driver’s.
“We were going towards Nandgaon for a meeting that was planned. I was sitting in the seat next to the driver’s.
Panewadi is around 10km away from Manmad on the Nandgaon-Manmad road. As soon as we passed a dhaba, saheb [Sonawane] noticed a truck standing nearby with people standing on it.
The truck was parked off the road, around 100 metres away, and there were five to six men around it, mixing fuel. Saheb asked the driver to take the car closer to the truck and stop. Saheb got out of the car and started questioning the men near the truck.
He also shot some clips of the truck on his mobile phone and asked me to call the talathi of Manmad and the local sub-inspector. I walked towards the road to make the phone calls. Until then, everything was calm.
I spoke to the officials and told them that saheb wants them to come to the spot. As I was talking to them, I saw two people coming towards us on a motorcycle. They stopped near me and pointed at saheb asking me if that was Yashwant Sonawane. They were carrying something that looked like a rod.
A few minutes later, I heard the driver scream and run towards me saying they had hit saheb on his head.
We ran past the dhaba to the spot and saw saheb lying on the ground. Someone had already poured kerosene on him and, suddenly, someone set him on fire. I can’t say who actually did it. The men then turned towards us. We got scared and ran. We sat in the car but couldn’t think. I called our senior officials, including the collector, and told them what had happened. We drove to Nandgaon to get help. By the time we returned with other officials, we saw saheb lying on the ground, his body charred.”
As told to Zeeshan Shaikh