A panchnama witness involved in the identification of a house in the Belagavi region of Karnataka that was allegedly used to finalise the conspiracy to kill the journalist Gauri Lankesh has complained of receiving a threat ahead of his visit to a special court in Bengaluru to testify in the trial of 17 persons arrested for the September 5, 2017, murder of the journalist.
The witness who ran a business in Belagavi had rented the house, which had been used by members of a right-wing crime syndicate involved in the murder of . He was made a panchnama witness when three accused persons in the case – Sharad (Kalaskar), Ganesh (Miskin), and Amit (Baddi) – identified the house.
The 55-year-old witness, who was summoned to the witness box last week, complained to the state public prosecutor (SPP) of receiving a threatening phone call ahead of his visit, and based on the complaint, the SPP filed a memo in the special court during the trial on May 28.
“Learned Spl. P.P. has filed a memo along with a requisition of CW (court witness)… Copy of the requisition is served on learned counsel for the accused,” the court noted.
“Despite the threats, the witness stuck to his statement in court,” a prosecution source said.
During the trial, the witness said that he had rented a house in Belagavi, and police officials brought two suspects in the murder case – Ganesh (Miskin) and Amit (Baddi) – to the house in August 2018. In September 2018, they brought a third accused identified as Sharad (Kalaskar). A fourth accused was also brought, but the witness claimed to have forgotten his name.
In the court, the witness identified Amit (Baddi), Shrikant (Pangarkar), and Sharad (Kalaskar) among the accused persons who were brought to the house where the alleged conspiracy occurred, but said he could not identify the fourth person due to the passage of time.
During the trial of the murder case last week, one of the prosecution witnesses turned hostile. The witness had earlier given a detailed statement to a magistrate about his participation in multiple training camps for the use of guns and explosives conducted by a Hindutva syndicate, which is implicated in the murder of Gauri Lankesh.
The 37-year-old prosecution witness, who is involved in grassroots politics in the Belagavi region of Karnataka, was declared hostile by the state special public prosecutor on Wednesday after he denied all the statements he had earlier made before a magistrate in September 2018 under Section 164 of the Criminal Procedure Code, 1973.
The witness who had identified several persons arrested for the murder of Gauri Lankesh as participants in the training camps also rejected the Test Identification Parade he had participated in at the prison in November 2018 and claimed that he had identified the accused persons under police duress.
During a cross-examination in the court after being declared hostile by the prosecution, the witness denied the charge that he was deviating from his earlier statements due to pressure from the accused persons – most of whom were granted bail last year.
Gauri Lankesh died after four bullets were fired at her by a man now identified by the SIT as Parashuram Waghmore, a former activist of the right-wing Sri Rama Sene outfit.
A forensic analysis of the four empty cartridges and the four bullets fired to kill Lankesh showed that the markings on the bullets and cartridges were the same as markings found on bullets and cartridges seized from the site of the killing of Kannada scholar and researcher M M Kalburgi in the northern Karnataka town of Dharwad on August 30, 2015.
Findings from the comparison of ballistic evidence from the Lankesh and Kalburgi cases also revealed that the 7.65 mm country-made gun used in the two murders in Karnataka had also been used in the shooting of the Leftist thinker Govind Pansare, 81, in Maharashtra’s Kolhapur on February 16, 2015.
The ballistic evidence indicated that one of the two guns used in the Pansare murder was used to kill the rationalist Narendra Dabholkar, 69, in on August 20, 2013.
The Karnataka Special Investigation Team (SIT) has named 17 people from right-wing fringe outfits for the conspiracy and murder of Gauri Lankesh. The accused have been charged with murder and involvement in an organised crime activity under the Karnataka Control of Organized Crimes Act, (KCOCA) 2000.
“The members of this organisation targeted persons whom they identified to be inimical to their belief and ideology. The members strictly followed the guidelines and principles mentioned in ‘Kshatra Dharma Sadhana’, a book published by Sanatan Sanstha,” the SIT said after it filed a 9,235-page chargesheet on November 23, 2018.
