A district court in the Koppal region of Karnataka has acquitted nine persons, including a close associate of a Congress minister, who were accused in the 2015 murder of a teenager who had complained to the media of corruption and maladministration and was later found dead on a railway track in the town. The district court Friday acquitted Hanumesh Nayak, 52, a contractor and ex-member of the zilla panchayat, his son Mahantesh Nayak, 30, and seven of their associates in the death of Yallalinga K, 17. The court ruled that the death of Yallalinga was a case of suicide on account of a death note being found on his person. “A1 (accused no. 1) to A9 are acquitted under section 235 (1) of CrPC for the offences under section 120 B, 109, 506, 302, 201 read with section 149 of IPC,” the Koppal district court ruled. Yallalinga was a resident of the Hulihyder Grama Panchayat in the Gangavathi taluk of the Koppal district. He was a second-year PU student at a private college in Gadag and was found dead on a railway track on the outskirts of Koppal on January 11, 2015. The railway police initially registered a case of unnatural death after they found a death note on the dead body. The case was converted into a murder probe in April 2015 after Yallalinga’s mother, Kenchamma, approached the Koppal superintendent of police and filed a complaint alleging that her son was murdered by a gang. The Koppal police team arrested Mahantesh Nayak, then 20, who was the son of contractor Hanumesh Nayak, a close associate of then Congress minister Shivaraj Tangadagi, who is also currently a minister in the Karnataka government, for the alleged murder along with his associates – Parashuram N, Manoj Patil, Durugappa L, Balana Gowda, Nanda Kumar, Manjunath and Yamanoorappa. The contractor, Hanumesh Nayak, was arrested later by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), which was handed the probe. The CID police have filed a charge sheet against all nine accused persons for murder, criminal conspiracy and assault. The CID chargesheet said that Yallalinga was targeted after he informed a local television channel about substandard contract work done at the Hulihyder village in Gangavathi. The accused were alleged to have followed Yallalinga around when he was travelling in a bus towards Koppal, and later attacked him at the Koppal railway station and pushed him on the railway track, leading to a train running over the youth. Earlier in 2016, the Koppal district court had ruled that none of the accused should be released on bail in the case. The court had ruled that the accused in the Yallalinga murder case “shall not be entitled to seek their enlargement on bail until the trial in SC.49/2015 is complete, for the reason that any one of them being let out on bail are likely to hamper the entire prosecution beyond redemption.” However, during the trial, as many as 15 key prosecution witnesses in the case turned hostile and did not support the case of the prosecution, leading to the acquittal of the accused over 10 years after they were arrested for the death.
