Bengaluru: Six months after senior journalist Gauri Lankesh’s murder, a special police team probing the case made the first arrest Friday. They have got five more days to continue the interrogation of KT Naveen Kumar, who was taken into custody for questioning a week ago.
Naveen Kumar, in his late thirties, is from Mandya district in Karnataka. He was caught at the Bengaluru city bus stand by the state police’s central crime branch on February 18 for allegedly being in illegal possession of a weapon and ammunition.
Sources in the special probe team told NDTV that they believe Naveen Kumar played a ‘small but significant’ role in the murder of Gauri Lankesh, who was shot dead at close range by unidentified men outside her home in Bengaluru on the night of September 5 last year. He is not being considered one of the main accused or the man who actually pulled the trigger but there is hope he will be able to give vital clues to the investigators.
Gauri Lankesh, 55, a critic of right-wing ideology and a fierce advocate of secularism, edited Gauri Lankesh Patrike, a weekly newspaper.
Her death was seen as part of a series of unsolved killings of rationalists that included Professor MM Kalburgi, who was shot outside his home in Dharwad in north Karnataka in 2015, and also the murders of Govind Pansare and Narendra Dabholkar from Maharashtra.
On Wednesday, Karnataka Home Minister Ramalinga Reddy had said that the murder probe would “end soon”. The minister has made similar statements earlier as well.