Solving Crime: When killers filmed their own death warrant

Around 2.45 am, Dhoddane received a call from the police control room that BJP Yuva Morcha leader Venkatesh Kurubara had sustained serious injuries in an accident. Dhoddane rushed to the spot and shifted Kurubara to a government hospital, where the doctors declared him ‘brought dead’.

During the initial probe, the traffic police found that Kurubara was heading towards Huligi, a temple village where a fair was being held, on a two-wheeler, when a Tata Indica car hit him. But the wounds on the body of Kurubara were telling a different story.

By then, one Prajwal walked into the hospital and claimed that Kurubara was murdered by half a dozen people. When Dhoddane asked how he was sure about it, Prajwal said he was pillion riding Kurubara’s bike and escaped when the attack happened.

Surrenders and arrests

Prakash L Mali, an inspector with the Gangavathi town police, had a long day before he fell asleep. “There was the Huligemma Devi temple fair happening, and a rumour started doing the rounds that a stampede had taken place… I had returned home by 1 am and fallen asleep when I received the message from Sharadamma Dhoddane,” Mali said.

By morning, the police had received information about the killers and even the car owner. While special teams were formed to hunt the accused, the killing of Kurubara had also taken a political turn, as he was active in politics. “On the morning of October 8, people around me were saying that I would be suspended as the incident had created furore, assuming it was a political or communal killing,” Mali remarked.

As the probe continued, the police found that the Indica car was abandoned a few km away from the attack site. By 7 am, four persons had walked into the Kampli police station, 10 km from Gangavathi, and had surrendered by claiming that they had killed Kurubara. Within 24 hours, the police arrested 8 more people, including a woman named Chaitra, 28.

The arrestees were Ravi Basavaraj, Vijay Mailari, Dhanraj, Bheema alias Bharat, Salim, Gangadhar Gouli, Karthik, Dadapeer, Mohammed Altaf, Mallikarjun, Sharana, and Chaitra. They were produced before the court and sent to judicial custody.

Motive

The motive behind the murder also became clearer soon. According to the court documents, Basavaraj and his gang had attacked one person named Maruthi, a friend of Kurubara, over a dispute. At that time, Kurubara had admitted Maruthi to the hospital. Later, he also provided information about the role of Basavaraj and helped the police to arrest him when he was hiding in Ballari. Kurubara was made one of the prosecution’s witnesses in the case.

While the police had established the motive, they needed more to prove it. “Besides motive, we also had CCTV footage, recovery of weapons, vehicles, and forensic traces. But we needed to corroborate more evidence. Then, Hampanna Jantkal, father of Venkatesh Kurubara, said that his son had received multiple threat calls on WhatsApp and Instagram from Ravi,” Mali said.

“We then wrote to Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp and Instagram, which provided the key details. But in this entire episode, Ravi Basavaraj’s audacity helped us to build strong evidence. Whenever he made threat calls, he video-recorded them from a different mobile phone, which ultimately helped us to nail them in court. There were videos of him threatening Venkatesh wherein he can be heard saying, ‘I will kill you in the next eight days’,” he added.

The voice notes and calls showed that Mallikarjun was following Kurubara for some time to plan the attack. On the day of the murder, Kurubara was heading to Huligemma Devi temple, believing the rumour that there was a stampede.

Conviction

The Gangavathi police filed a 927-page chargesheet against the 12 accused under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS). On April 23 this year, the first additional district and sessions court of Koppal district awarded the death penalty to six of them – Basavaraj, Mailari, Dhanraj, Bharat, Salim, and Gouli. It acquitted Karthik, Dadapeer, Mohammad Altaf, Mallikarjun, Sharana, and Chaitra.

As many as 83 witnesses were examined, 16 screengrabs of CCTV footage, videos, and medical reports were among the 434 exhibits produced before the court.

Why death penalty

Judge Sadananda Nagappa Naik, in a 500-page judgment, stated that there was a need for the protection of eyewitnesses in this country. Citing 2023 National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, Naik said, “2,72,198 murder cases are pending for trial in India. Conviction rate in murder cases is only 37.7 per cent. Does this mean that the remaining 62.3 per cent are false murder cases? The answer is no… acquittal does not mean that the accused is innocent. It only means that there are no sufficient materials (oral or documentary) to convict the accused. If the eyewitnesses are murdered, the remaining witnesses also may turn hostile…”

The order said, “When the eyewitness is killed, and minimum punishment is imposed, the same conveys a wrong message to society. The person who kills the eyewitness must be awarded the maximum sentence. Then only eyewitnesses in this country feel secure… Let the world feel that it is a divine duty to give evidence before the court. The law will not spare attack(s) on witness(es) of the court.”