Cold-blooded murder of Gauri Lankesh takes a curve, SIT requested to extend custody

BENGALURU: The sad death of journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh who was murdered by the alleged shooter Parshuram Waghmare will be presented before the court on Monday.

SIT officials said that Waghmare, who was arrested on June 11 from Sindagi in Vijayapura taluk, was sent on 14-day police custody by the Third ACMM Court on June 12. “The police custody is ending on Monday. We will seek an extension,” an SIT official said.

The probe team will also request for the permission of the court to take four other accused Amit Degveker, Amol Kale, Sujeet and Manohar – for narco-analysis and lie-detector tests at the Forensic Sciences Laboratory at Gandhinagar in Gujarat. 

“Parshuram has been cooperating with us since his arrest. We have been able to solve a major part of the sensational crime because of his confession. The team does not have plans to take him for the tests.”

The SIT had to hold back in April when K.T. Naveen Kumar or Hotte Manja, who was an alleged gunrunner and the first to be arrested in the case, had refused to undergo a narco-analysis test.

Naveen had agreed to undergo the test before a magistrate in Bengaluru and the SIT had taken him to Ahmedabad on April 16. But after reaching Gujarat, he reported allegedly that he was forced into the test by the SIT.

Meanwhile, sketches of the three men who involved with Waghmare in person have been made and circulated all over the state.

During the investigation operation, it was revealed that the same gun that was used to kill Kannada scholar Dr M.M. Kalburgi, 77, and Leftist thinker Govind Pansare, 81, in 2015 was used to kill Gauri. But Waghmare was not involved in those murders, officials said.