Gauri Lankesh murder trial: Cop reports finding cache of basic mobile phones at key suspect’s house in deposition

The police seized all the items found at the house, produced them in the court and showed them to the police officer, who identified them as being seized at the apartment of Kumar.

Out of the four receipts for the purchase of mobile phones, three were from the same store in Udupi. When the investigators visited the store, the owner informed them that the phones were brought from the store and provided evidence of the purchase.

The store owner also reported that two phones had been returned after purchase by Kumar, and these were also seized, the police officer said.

The police also visited a second store in Udupi from where one of the phones was bought and collected records to corroborate the purchase.

The investigations by a Karnataka SIT of the murder of Gauri Lankesh, 55, outside her home in Bengaluru on September 5, 2017, revealed that a right-wing group linked to the murder used a separate mobile phone to communicate with every person it recruited for extremist activities including the shooting of other progressive thinkers.

Following the arrest of two key accused — Amol Kale, 37, and Sujit Kumar, 38 — in 2018, the SIT found 20 mobile phones in a bag carried by Kale and 18 others stashed on shelves in the kitchen of a house in Udupi where Kumar had been living.

The SIT investigations revealed that Kale, a former coordinator of the Sanatan Sanstha affiliated Hindu Janajagruti Samiti in Pune, who headed a secretive right-wing group; and Sujit Kumar, a former HJS worker in Karnataka, recruited dozens of youths willing to resort to violence for the cause of Hindutva between 2011 and 2018 and used a separate phone to talk to each recruit.

In a statement provided to the SIT after his arrest in May 2018, the primary recruiter for the covert group, Sujit Kumar, outlined how the secretive unit recruited radical-minded youths for the cause of Hindutva.

“Maintaining secrecy is a prime focus for our group. When we recruit any youth for our activities, we never give him our mobile numbers. We speak to them only through public phone booths initially. Once we are sure that a youth is suited to participate in our activities, we provide them with a mobile phone to be used for exclusive communication with us and designate a code name for the youth for the communications,” Sujit Kumar is quoted as saying in a statement.

The SIT has named 17 persons from right-wing Hindutva fringe outfits for the conspiracy and shooting down of Gauri Lankesh.

The journalist was killed after four bullets were fired at her by a man wearing a helmet – now identified by the SIT as Parashuram Waghmore, a former Sri Rama Sene activist.

A forensic analysis of the four empty cartridges and the four bullets fired to kill Gauri Lankesh showed that the markings on the bullets and cartridges were the same as markings found on bullets and cartridges recovered from the site of the killing of Kannada scholar and researcher M M Kalburgi, 77, in the northern Karnataka town of Dharwad on August 30, 2015.

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 Kolhapur in Maharashtra on February 16, 2015.

The ballistic evidence also indicated that one of the two guns used in the Pansare murder was used to kill the rationalist Narendra Dabholkar, 69, at Pune in Maharashtra on August 20, 2013.

“The members of this organization targeted persons who 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 9235-page chargesheet against the accused in the case on November 23, 2018.