NEW DELHI:National Investigating Agency (NIA) on Friday told the Supreme Court that it cannot investigate the murder of scholar M M Kalburgi in 2015 at Dharwad in Karnataka.Additional Solicitor General Pinky Anand told a bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra that NIA is a special agency to probe national and inter-state terrorism cases only and the offence in this case did not fall under the category of ‘Schedule offence’ under the NIA act, so the agency cannot investigate it.
The court was hearing the plea of Uma Devi Kalburgi, the widow of the scholar, seeking a SIT probe into the sensational murder. The court asked CBI and the governments of Maharashtra and Karnataka to file their responses in the meantime and slated the hearing for July.
Kalburgi’s wife, in her petition has alleged that there was common link between the murder of her husband and that of intellectual activists, Narendra Achyut Dabholkar and Govindrao Pansare. Dabholkar was shot at on August 20, 2013 in Pune, while Pansare was killed in Kolhapur in Maharashtra on February 16, 2015.
It alleged in her petition that one of the weapons used in the murder of Pansare was used to kill Kalburgi and therefore coordination between Maharashtra police and Karnataka police, besides the CBI and the NIA, was required.
“Although sketches of suspects were released after four days of Kalburgi’s murder and statement was issued by Karnataka government that conclusive evidence of nexus of murders of all three activists was found, there has been no progress in the investigation till date,” the plea has said adding that the investigation done by Karnataka police so far has not resulted in any success so far in nabbing the accused.
77-year old Kalburgi, the former Vice-Chancellor of Hampi University, was shot dead in broad daylight at his residence in Kalyan Nagar in Dharwad, Karnataka, on August 30, 2015.
Kalburgi’s wife, in her petition filed through advocate Krishna Kumar, has also said the investigations in Dabholkar and Pansare murder cases were also in a “sorry state” and no progress has been made in bringing the killers to book.The petition said that in 2016, the then Karnataka Home Minister had in a statement claimed that as per the forensic analysis of cartridges recovered from the three separate crime scenes, the three murders were linked.
What the petition says
Kalburgi’s wife, in her petition has alleged that there was a common link between the murder of her husband and that of intellectual activists, Narendra Achyut Dabholkar and Govindrao Pansare
The petition also alleged that one of the weapons used in the murder of Pansare was used to kill Kalburgi and therefore coordination between Maharashtra and Karnataka police, besides the CBI and the NIA, was required
It also says that the probes into Dabholkar and Pansare murder cases are also in a “sorry state”