Man resembling Kalburgi murder suspect found shot dead

• Police buried his body as nobody claimed it; corpse may be exhumed

 

Belagavi, October 29, 2015 (DHNS): The Criminal Investigation Department (CID), which is hunting for the killers of Kannada researcher M M Kalburgi, may exhume the body of an unidentified man who was found shot dead near Manikwadi village in Khanapur taluk on October 18 and buried by the police on Tuesday.

 

The sketch of one of the two suspects in Kalburgi’s murder resembles the unidentified man who was gunned down with a country-made pistol at point-blank range. He was shot in the back of the neck and in the abdomen. The pistol is freely available. The Khanapur police had found two empty shells of the bullet near the body.

 

After the body was found and the post-mortem performed, the police circulated his photographs across police stations in an effort to establish his identity. But nobody turned up to claim the body. As a result, they got his body buried in a graveyard in Belagavi on Tuesday, Belagavi Superintendent of Police, B R Ravikanthe Gowda, told.

 

CID sleuths are trying to determine whether the unidentified man was indeed one of the two suspects they are hunting for in Kalburgi’s murder. On Wednesday evening, CID officers inspected the spot in Manikwadi village where the unidentified man was found murdered. They checked his photographs that were taken after the post-mortem with the sketch released by the Hubballi-Dharwad police and found some resemblance, according to a source.

 

But Gowda wasn’t as excited. He said that according to Kalburgi’s wife, the murderer had dark complexion while the unidentified deceased was red-skinned. He appealed to people to immediately approach the police in case of missing persons. Police may exhume the body. The dead man’s photographs have been forwarded to the Special Investigation Team of the Maharashtra police in an attempt to establish his identity, the source said.

 

The source also asked why the Khanapur police who had found the unidentified body didn’t intimate the CID despite the dead man’s resemblance with one of the suspects in Kalburgi’s murder.

 

The CID’s Deputy Inspector General of Police Hemant Nimbalkar and other senior officers arrived in Belagavi in the day and left for Khanapur in the evening to carry out further investigation.