Was same weapon used to kill rationalists? CBI unsure

Bombay HC tells agency to come up with report in a month

Two months after the Karnataka CID suggested that the same weapon could have been used to murder Kannada scholar MM Kalburgi and rationalist leaders Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) said it was yet to arrive at a conclusive forensic report.

The CBI, which is probing the Dabholkar murder case, said that it needed to get a third opinion on the ballistic reports to ascertain this.

On Monday, the CBI submitted before the Bombay high court that a 7.65mm gun was used to shoot all three and a gun was recovered in the Dabholkar probe recently, it could not say for certain that the same weapon was used for the other two murders.

Pansare was murdered in Kolhapur in February 2015 and Dabholkar was shot in Pune in August 2013. Kalburgi was murdered in August last year.

Appearing for the CBI, additional solicitor general Anil Singh told HC that while the forensic science laboratory (FSL) in Bangalore said that different weapons were used in the murders, the Kalina FSL in Mumbai had claimed that the weapon used in all the three cases were the same.

A bench of justice Ranjit More and justice VL Achiliya, however, granted the CBI only four weeks to come up with a conclusive ballistic report.

The bench has been monitoring the probe into the murders of Dabholkar and Pansare since September last year following a plea filed by the family members of Dabholkar and Pansare.

In the earlier hearing, advocate Abhay Nevagi, counsel for the petitioners, had told HC that bullet cartridges found at the scene of Kalburgi’s murder and cartridges recovered from the spots where Pansare and Dabholkar had been killed, had provided evidence that the bullets in the three cases were fired from the same weapon.

The CBI, probing the Dabholkar case, and the state CID, which is investigating the Pansare murder case, submitted in sealed covers, the progress reports of their investigations to the court on Monday.