After 3 months in prison, ‘masked man’ who made allegations of secret burials in Dharmasthala gets bail

Chinnaiah was granted bail in connection with a case registered on July 4 at the Dharmasthala police station, where he is the complainant, “on execution of personal bond for Rs 1,00,00 with two sureties” and on the condition of being available for investigations.

Among the conditions imposed while granting bail to Chinnaiah are that “he shall not abscond” and that “he shall not give any kind of interview/ statement pertaining” to the crime to “social media or TV channels or press/newspaper”.

The grant of bail came four days after the SIT filed a report in a magistrate’s court in Belthangady in Dakshina Kannada district for the initiation of a perjury case against the former sanitation worker and four others who allegedly created a “fake narrative”. The SIT filed the report after finding no evidence for the “secret burials” and alleged fabrication of evidence to support the secret burials narrative. It was filed under section 215 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita on November 20 in the magistrate’s court for the initiation of the process under BNSS section 379 for perjury, SIT sources said.

The filing of a report under BNSS section 215 will allow the initiation of perjury charges against Chinnaiah and others who are accused in the SIT report of conspiring to create a fake narrative about the involvement of Dharmasthala temple authorities in the “secret burials”, sources in the SIT said.

Chinnaiah produced a skull he claimed to have been part of the “secret burials” he had conducted at the temple town. SIT investigations, however, revealed that the skull was given by the uncle of a 2012 teenage rape and murder victim in the region. The 2012 murder probe did not stand up to legal scrutiny and no one was found guilty in the end due to the hampering of evidence despite probes by the CBI, CID, and local police.

‘Conspiracy hatched by several activists’

The former sanitation worker was allegedly part of a conspiracy hatched by several activists in the region–including former right-wing activists Mahesh Thimmarody and Girish Mattanavar, left-wing activist Jayanth T, and the man who gave Chinnaiah the skull–to target the Dharmasthala temple authorities, who wield a lot of clout in the administration of the temple town.

The SIT’s filing of a report under BNSS section 215 also came on the heels of the Karnataka High Court lifting a stay on investigations in the Dharmasthala secret burials case on November 12.

The activists approached the high court on October 30 to quash the FIR in the case, which was based on the complaint of Chinnaiah. The activists have not been accused in the original case but are likely to be named if the courts order the initiation of a perjury case.
Police sources said that investigations had suggested a conspiracy to malign the administrators of the Sree Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara Temple Trust and its dharmadhikari, Veerendra Heggade, a Rajya MP associated with the BJP.

The former sanitation worker has claimed to have buried dozens of unidentified bodies in cases of suspicious deaths in the region. Based on his allegations, the Dharmasthala police filed an FIR on July 4 but sought an official statement from him in court.

The former sanitation worker appeared before a magistrate’s court in Belthangady on July 11 to provide a statement to substantiate his claims. On July 19, the Congress Government constituted an SIT headed by DGP-rank officer Pranab Mohanty to investigate the claims.

The complainant, who worked as a sanitation worker in Dharmasthala from 1995 to 2014 and whose identity remained protected, initially claimed that he witnessed some murders being committed in a “cruel manner” and that he was subsequently forced to dispose of the bodies.

“I have buried hundreds of bodies and the final rites were not performed respectfully. The guilt is haunting me and I believe that the final rites should be performed to pave a respectful farewell to the deceased,” he said in a letter sent to the police through his advocates ahead of the filing of the case.

SIT’s search for human remains

A two-week search for the remains of bodies from the alleged secret burials in the Dharmasthala region, however, yielded no major results. The SIT, which began the search for the remains on July 29, found remains of only one body in the form of bones at one of 13 locations indicated by the former sanitation worker, police sources said.

The remains of a person who died by suicide was found hanging from a tree during the search operations on the banks of the Nethravati river and the forests surrounding the bathing ghats near Dharmasthala, and a case of unnatural death was registered, sources said.

While a woman who claimed to be a former CBI stenographer had come forward to allege that her daughter who was an MBBS student in KMC Manipal had gone missing in Dharmasthala in 2003, the police probe has not substantiated the claim. Sources said the claims of the woman being a former CBI employee and having a daughter who studied MBBS at Manipal did not pass scrutiny during verifications.

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