The Bombay High Court on Thursday criticised the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Special Investigation Team probing the murders of rationalists Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare. Refusing to accept the status report filed by the two agencies, the High Court criticised them for submitting similar reports every time as status reports, reported ANI.
“The CBI and the CID have been maintaining that they are coordinating with the Karnataka Police probing the killings of writer MM Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh,” the court said. “They have also been claiming that they are keeping a watch on certain ‘sansthas’ or organisations. Then how did the Karnataka authorities manage to make an arrest from Maharashtra?”
It added: “Is there a lack of coordination, or are the authorities before us restricting their probe to merely pursuing mobile phone records?”
The court was hearing petitions filed by the victims’ families that sought its monitoring of the investigations. “We do not take any pleasure in summoning these senior police officers,” the court had earlier said. “But the concerns that this court has raised in the previous hearings haven’t been assuaged.”
Dabholkar was shot dead in Pune on August 20, 2013, and Pansare was killed in Kolhapur in February two years later. The CBI is looking into Dabholkar’s murder, and a special team led by the additional superintendent of police in Kolhapur is investigating that of Pansare.
In June, the court criticised officials from the CBI and the Maharashtra government for conducting an “unsatisfactory inquiry” into the two murders. Observing that investigations have not been “conducted sincerely”, it had summoned the investigating agency’s joint director and the state’s additional chief secretary to appear in court on July 12.
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