In less than a week after it took into custody a retired police officer in the 2010 murder of RTI activist activist Satish Shetty, the CBI has arrested another retired police Sub-Inspector (SI) in connection with the case.
Identifying the arrested police officer as Namdev Kauthale, a senior CBI official said that Kauthale was a SI with the local Crime Branch (CB), when Shetty was brutally murdered by some unidentified assailants in January 2010. Kauthale had retired as an Assistant Police Inspector (API) in 2013.
Kauthale was produced before a Pune court on Monday. The court remanded him in CBI custody till April 16.
Kauthale used to work under B R Andhalkar, who was a police inspector with lCB at the time of Shetty's murder. Andhalkar was arrested on April 6 by the CBI.
Andhalkar is the first suspect arrested in the case ever since the CBI reopened the case in early 2015. Andhalkar was part of the team that had investigated the Shetty murder case and arrested some suspects in the case.
Satish Shetty, who had made a mark for himself as an RTI activist by exposing corrupt land deals at lonavla and Pimpri-Chinchwad near Pune, was stabbed to death by some unidentified assailants while he was taking a walk on the morning of January 13, 2010.
Satish Shetty, it may be recalled, had on October 15, 2009, lodged a complaint with the lonavala police against 13, including Virendra Mhaiskar, chairman and managing director of Ideal Road Builders (IRB) Infrastructure Developers limited, and a sub-registrar, accusing the IRB group of and its subsidiary, Aryan Infrastructure Investment Pvt. ltd., of grabbing Government and private land in Maval Taluk by forging documents and manipulating land records.
In a submission made seven months after the investigating agency filed a closure report in the case before a Wadgaon-Maval court in Pune district, the CBI's lawyer Hiten Venegaonkar had told a HC Division Bench headed by Justice V K Tahilramani that the case would be re-investigated by the agency's Delhi special Crime Branch, instead of its Pune unit which had carried out the earlier investigations.
At that time, the HC bench was hearing a petition filed by Shetty's brother Sandeep Shetty, alleging irregularities in the CBI probe and seeking the prosecution of a former CBI Director and a special director.
In his petition, Sandeep Shetty has among other things alleged that the CBI's investigating officer S P Singh had filed a closure report in the case, after he was pressured to do so by his superiors.
The petitioner had stated till February 2014, the CBI investigating officer had been maintaining that the agency was on the right track in investigation, but later he seemed to have come under "tremendous pressure" from some quarters and there were clear indications that someone was "jeopardising the probe".
In its closure report filed in the case before the Wadgaon-Maval court on August 11, 2014, the CBI had claimed that it did not find "sufficient or prosecutable" evidence against any of the accused persons.
The CBI's move to file a closure report in the Satish Shetty murder case had come three days after the Bombay High Court allowed the central Investigating agency to re-investigate the complaint of land grab filed by the slain RTI activist against Virendra Mhaiskar, chairman and managing director of Ideal Road Builders (IRB) Infrastructure Developers limited, "in the interest of justice".
In his intervention application filed before the high court on March 3, 2010, seeking a CBI inquiry into themurder of his brother, Sadeep Shetty had alleged that some "bigwigs" were behind the murder of his brother. He had also suspected the alleged involvement of the IRB group officials in the murder.
Following the litigation, the Maharashtra government had handed over the investigations into Satish Shetty'smurder to the CBI on April 7, 2010.