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A Pune court on May 10 convicted two accused persons and acquitted three in the murder of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar.
Accused Sachin Andure, and Sharad Kalaskar were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment along with a penalty of ₹5 lakh.
Dr. Virendrasingh Tawade, Vikram Bhave and Sanjeev Punalekar were acquitted.
Dabholkar, a well-known rationalist, was shot dead while on a morning walk on Omkareshwar Bridge here on August 20, 2013. Five persons have been named as accused in the case.-
The accused were opposed to Dabholkar’s crusade against superstition, the prosecution had stated in its final arguments. Pune police initially probed the case. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) took over the probe in 2014 following a Bombay High Court, order and arrested Dr Virendrasinh Tawade, an ENT surgeon linked to the Hindu right-wing organisation Sanatan Sanstha, in June 2016.
Dabholkar’s murder was followed by the murders of three other rationalists/activists in the next four years: communist leader Govind Pansare (Kolhapur, February 2015), Kannada scholar and writer M M Kalburgi (Dharwad, August 2015) and journalist Gauri Lankesh (Bengaluru, September 2017).
It was suspected that the culprits in these four cases were linked to each other.
