New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday transferred the pSIT robe into the killing of rationalist M M Kalburgi to the SIT investigating the murder case of journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh after Karnataka government said there were common links in the two cases. Kalburgi, a former vice-chancellor of Hampi University and well-known epigraphist, was shot dead at his residence in Kalyan Nagar in Dharwad, Karnataka, on August 30, 2015.
Born in 1938, he was a Sahitya Akademi award-winning writer of old Kannada literature. The state Crime Investigation Department was probing Kalburgi’s killing and the SIT was investigating the murder of Lankesh in September 2017 in Bengaluru.
During the hearing, the top court said the SIT probe into Kalburgi’s killing will be monitored by the Dharwad bench of the Karnataka High Court. A bench of justices R F Nariman and Vineet Saran said if killings of Kalburgi, Lankesh and social activist Govind Pansare and rationalist Narendra Dabholkar are linked, it should be probed by one agency and monitored by one high court.
Advocate Devadatt Kamat, appearing for Karnataka government, said there is already an SIT probing the Lankesh case, while a Maharashtra Special Investigation Team was probing the killing of Pansare in 2015. He said the CBI was probing Dabholkar’s killing on August 20, 2013.
The apex court’s order came on a plea by Kalburgi’s wife, who had alleged that there was a common link between the murder of her husband and that of Dabholkar and Pansare, and hence the probe should be done by CBI. On January 25, the top court had termed the plea “very serious case”.
On December 11 last year, the court had favoured a CBI probe into the murders of Kalburgi, Pansare and Lankesh, if there appeared any “common thread” in these incidents. The killings of all these three activists happened within a period of five years. The top court had asked the CBI to inform it whether it would like to investigate these three murder cases as it is already probing the killing of Dabholkar.
