Journalist Gauri Lankesh was shot dead at close range by unknown assailants at her home in Bengaluru on September 5, 2017.
Around five months before journalist Gauri Lankesh was killed at her residence in Bengaluru on September 5, 2017, two youths from Hubli in north Karnataka, who are linked to a radical Hindutva groups, identified her home after following her from work one day to begin preparations for the killing, a Special Investigation Team of Karnataka police has found.
The Hubli youths, Ganesh Miskin, 27, and Amit Baddi, 28, were arrested on July 22. Miskin, the alleged rider of the motorcycle that brought the suspected shooter Parashuram Waghmare, 26, to the doorstep of Lankesh’s home on September 5, 2017, and Baddi, who drove a van that facilitated the escape of the killers after the shooting, were allegedly provided the address of the journalist’s office by an activist of a Hindutva group who is under the SIT’s scanner.
After finding Lankesh’s home, the two youths, who have a police record for involvement in communal violence, watched her activities and movement for many days, the SIT has found.
Lankesh was known as an anti-establishment voice with strident anti-right wing views (Express Photo/Tashi Tobgyal)
“With the intent of murdering Lankesh, the two accused persons stayed at several places in Bengaluru,’’ the SIT stated in a court application, seeking custody of the two men on July 23. They also watched over Lankesh’s home to plan the murder, the SIT said. The duo conducted their first surveillance over her movements in March-April 2017, police sources said.
The SIT investigation found that the duo and several others —- including the alleged shooter Waghmare of Vijayapura in north Karnataka and the main operations manager Amol Kale, 37, from Pune — assembled in Bengaluru in June 2017 with the intent to carry out the murder of Lankesh. The June plan was, however, aborted by Kale, who was not satisfied with the preparations of his associates and chose to start again by personally studying the journalist’s home and surrounding areas to draw up a plan.
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While the group involved directly in the murder — Kale, Parashuram, Miskin, Baddi and two men who are yet to be apprehended —- stayed together in June 2017 in a house at Seegehalli in west Bengaluru rented by Suresh Kumar, 37, an activist of the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS), they chose a new house to carry out the murder plan in September 2017, the SIT has found.
While they put the murder plan in cold storage in June 2017, the group rented out out a small shop in a building near the residence of HJS “seeker” Suresh Kumar in west Bengaluru and stashed the material they had bought for the murder like helmets, sources said.
When the murder plan was put in motion again around July 2017, Kale allegedly roped in the services of Mohan Nayak, 50, who had links to Sanatan Sanstha and HJS, hailing from Sampaje in Dakshina Kannada, to rent a house in Kumbalgodu, 15 km from Lankesh’s home, on the pretext of running an ayurveda clinic. Nayak, who was given a dedicated mobile number for communications with Kale, rented the house for three months paying an advance of Rs 25,000. He then handed it over to Kale.
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The core group — Miskin, Waghmare, Baddi, two missing persons, Kale and his associate Amit Degwekar, 38, a resident of Sanatan Sanstha ashram in Goa —- allegedly gathered again in Bengaluru around September 3 to execute the murder. While Miskin, Waghmare, Baddi and a fourth person were lodged in the house rented by Nayak, others including Kale and one Nihal alias Dada stayed at the house rented earlier by Suresh Kumar, the probe found.
The group initially tried to execute the murder on September 4, but the attempt was abandoned after they found that Lankesh was already inside her home. On September 5, they put the plot into action again, and Lankesh was shot dead at the entrance to her house around 8.30 pm. A helmet-clad Waghmare allegedly pulled the trigger to fire four bullets from the country-made pistol while Miskin allegedly waited on a motorcycle a few metres away.
The SIT found that soon after the murder, Miskin and Waghmare rode up to to a van driven by Baddi, which was parked some distance from Lankesh’s home and handed over their guns to the persons in the van and changed clothes before fleeing in the van to their safehouse and later exiting the city.
A second four-wheeler, a car driven by a man who is yet to be arrested, was also used for providing support to the motorcycle-borne killers, the SIT found.