E-Paper
‘Checking if accused held in Gauri Lankesh murder has links to Dabholkar, Pansare killings’
State home minister Anil Deshmukh on Friday said the state police will check whether the accused arrested in the Gauri Lankesh murder case in Karnataka has any links
State home minister Anil Deshmukh on Friday said the state police will check whether the accused arrested in the Gauri Lankesh murder case in Karnataka has any links to the murder of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar and communist leader Govind Pansare in Maharashtra. He said the state police may send a team to Karnataka to interrogate the accused.
The Karnataka police’s SIT, which is probing the murder of activist-journalist Gauri Lankesh, recently arrested Rushikesh Devdikar from Jharkhand. The SIT had earlier come across links between the murder of Dabholkar, Pansare and Karnataka scholar MM Kalburgi. Maharashtra ATS had arrested three accused for their alleged involvement in the Pansare case in September 2019, one of who reportedly had links to the Dabholkar case, while another was linked to the Lankesh case. Against this backdrop and the similar modus operandi used in the murders, the state police, too, are exploring the possibility of links between these murders. Deshmukh said the state police officers were in touch with their counterparts in Karnataka. “We are checking if there is any link between the murder of Lankesh and the Maharashtra rationalists. We sought information from the Karnataka police about the latest arrest in the Lankesh case.”
Deshmukh also said the decision on whether the Justice BL Loya death case will be reopened will be taken at an appropriate time. “We won’t talk about it at this juncture,” he said.
