Gauri Lankesh murder trial: Witness identifies 2 accused men who borrowed his mobile phone for ‘emergency call’

The witness told the special court conducting the trial of the murder case last week that he was approached at his cement shop in north Bengaluru one morning in the second week of September 2017 with a request to use his mobile phone on an emergency basis.

The record of the call from the mobile phone of the witness was found by the SIT in the call data records of accused H L Suresh, a member of the right-wing Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS), who was found to have played an active role in the murder by harbouring and assisting the shooters and plotters from the right-wing crime syndicate in executing the murder of the journalist.

The witness who earlier identified the two men who approached him to use his phone in September 2017 as Sudhanva Gondhalekar, a businessman from Satara in Maharashtra, and Amit Baddi, a right-wing activist from Hubbali, identified the two men again during the trial in court last week.

The SIT probe in the Gauri Lankesh murder case found that Sudhanva Gondhalekar was closely associated with Amol Kale, a former Hindu Janajagruti Samiti convenor in Pune, who has been identified as the head of the operations of a covert group that executed the murder of Lankesh and three others between 2013 and 2017.

The close link between Kale and Gondhalekar emerged from the phone call records of Kale – which the SIT accessed after the former HJS man was arrested in the Lankesh case on May 31, 2018 – and from references made to Gondhalekar in a diary Kale maintained – often in code – about the operations he was carrying out in Karnataka for the ‘cause of Hindutva’.

Gondhalekar was referred to as “Pandey” and “Gujjar” in Kale’s diary and during communications with gang members.

The arrest of Gondhalekar revealed that he was the custodian of two guns used by the covert group to carry out four murders. Gondhalekar indicated after his arrest in 2018 that he retrieved the guns used for the Gauri Lankesh murder and kept them in his possession.

During the longest stretch of the trial in the Lankesh murder case – spanning 10 days between December 4 and December 13 – a panchnama witness (PW 162) identified Gondhalekar as the man who showed several places in Satara where the guns used for the murder of the journalist were stored after the murder.

The witness told the court that at one house in Kodoli in Satara – which Gondhalekar claimed to have used to store the guns – he also reported an accident with one of the guns while it was being serviced by a gang member – resulting in an injury to the gang member.

The SIT probe of the Gauri Lankesh murder has revealed that an organised crime syndicate formed in the year 2010-11 under the leadership of Dr Virendra Tawade alias Bade Bhaisaab, a former activist of the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, carried out targeted assassinations of prominent persons considered to be opponents of radical Hindutva.

“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 stated in its charge sheet filed in November 2018.

The Karnataka SIT has stated in its charge sheet that forensic ballistic analysis has established that Gauri Lankesh was killed with the same pistol that was used to murder Kannada scholar Prof M M Kalburgi, 77, in Dharwad on August 30, 2015, and leftist thinker Govind Pansare, 81, in Kolhapur, Maharashtra on February 16, 2015.

The Karnataka Forensic Science Laboratory has also found that one of two guns used in the shooting of Pansare in Kolhapur in February 2015 was used to murder Maharashtra rationalist Narendra Dabholkar, 69, at Pune on August 20, 2013.