Court nod for Pune cops to question Gauri Lankesh case accused

BENGALURU: Two police officers from Pune have approached the special court for Karnataka Control of Organised Crime Act (KCOCA) cases seeking permission to question Amol Kale and Vasudev Suryavanshi, among the accused in journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh's murder case and lodged in Central Prison.
The two cops appeared before special judge Ramachandra Huddar on Monday and said they wanted to question Kale and Suryavanshi in connection with the assassination of rationalist Govind Pansare.The court granted permission, and the questioning is likely to happen anytime this week. According to Maharashtra police, Kale was among the masterminds in the Pansare assassination, while Suryavanshi, nicknamed 'Mechanic', supplied a motorbike to the assassins who shot dead the rationalist in Kolhapur, Maharashtra in February 2015.
In the ongoing trial into the Gauri murder, a nodal officer from a private cellular firm, Ravi Noronha, deposed before the court during the day. He said based on requests made by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing the case, he provided call detail records (CDR) of three different mobile numbers, extracted between March 1, 2017 and February 28, 2018.
According to the SIT chargesheet, the numbers were purchased in Maddur (Mandya), Sindgi and Hubballi (North Karnataka) in private individuals' names and were used by three of the accused in the Gauri murder case.
Noronha said the CDR pertaining to the numbers ran into 146 pages (112 pages of Hubballi number, 28 of Maddur number and six pages of Sindgi number). However, defence counsel Krishnamoorthy P questioned Noronha on the legality of the CDR sheets.
"According to rules laid down by the department of telecommunications, CDR of one year can be given to the investigating police by cellular firms. Anything beyond the period of one year is illegal. Here, you say that SIT placed a request with you on March 21, 2018 for CDR. Legally, you could provide them CDR for only the period between March 21, 2018 and March 21, 2017. But your records show you handed over the CDR from March 1, 2017 itself," Krishnamoorthy contended.
Noronha replied that SIT had requested him to store the CDR of those three numbers, much prior to officially placing the requests.