The names of two absconding men, who were accused in the 2006 and 2008 Malegaon blasts cases, also surfaced during the Karnataka Police’s investigation into the murder of 55-year-old journalist Gauri Lankesh outside her home in Bengaluru in September 2017.
Ramchandra Kalsangra and Sandeep Dange, who are also wanted in the 2007 Hyderabad Mecca Masjid blast case, and the 2007 Ajmer Sharif blast case, were suspected to be among the four men who trained some of the 17 men, arrested in the Gauri Lankesh case, at secret camps where training was provided to recruits to make bombs.
Kalsangara and Dange, who are linked to the right-wing outfit Abhinav Bharat, are also among seven men linked to multiple terrorism cases in the country between 2006 and 2009 who have disappeared in the last 15 years.
The others are Ramesh alias Amit alias Ashok alias Ashwini Chauhan who is also linked to Abhinav Bharat and wanted in the 2006 Malegaon blasts and the 2007 Samjhauta Express blasts cases; Jay Prakash alias Anna, Praveen Limkar, Sarang Akolkar, and Rudra Patil are all linked to the Sanatan Sanstha and wanted in a 2009 Goa blast case where a member of the group was killed.
Terror training camps
During the course of its investigations into Gauri Lankesh’s murder, the Karnataka Police Special Invstigation Team (SIT) found that a Sanatan Sanstha linked group organised 19 training camps in the usage of firearms, Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), and subterfuge tactics across India between 2011 and 2017 with “guest trainers” attending five of the camps held in Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Karnataka.
Based on descriptions provided by those arrested and witnesses in the Gauri Lankesh case who saw the “bomb experts” at the training camps, Karnataka SIT prepared sketches of the “guest trainers,” and identified their possible locations through technical analysis, police sources said in 2018.
“Most of the pictures available for the missing suspects from the blast cases that occurred between 2006 and 2008 were very old. Portraits were created in March 2018 from descriptions provided by persons arrested in Karnataka, and this helped in finding one of the “guest trainers,” said a police source.
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As many as three people linked to Sanatan Sanstha who were arrested in the Gauri Lankesh murder case, and four witnesses who attended these training camps described the presence of a “bade babaji” and four other “gurujis” at the camps, according to documents placed in court by the Karnataka Police in the Gauri Lankesh case.
According to statements provided by these men, some of the trainers, like the “bade babaji”, dressed as monks. Each trainer had his own area of expertise, ranging from petrol bombs to sophisticated pipe bombs with electrical circuits.
Arrest of Abhinav Bharat member
One of the several missing men named in the terror cases between 2006 and 2009, Suresh Nair, 45, who is linked to Abhinav Bharat and the 2007 Ajmer blast case, was arrested by the Gujarat Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) in the state’s Bharuch in November 2018.
Nair’s arrest came after he was identified during the investigation into the Gauri Lankesh murder case by the Karnataka Police as one of four trainers who attended the weapons training camps.
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Suresh Nair was identified as the “bade babaji” after his arrest in Gujarat. Nair’s arrest, 11 years after he went into hiding, also suggested that the other unidentified trainers at the camps who came in the garb of “babajis” could possibly be Sandeep Dange and Ramji Kalsangra.
Based on the investigations through the sketches, there are suggestions that two of the mystery trainers who have not been identified or arrested may have been the missing Kalsangara and Dange, who may have attended the camps as trainers like their associate Suresh Nair. However, there were claims in Maharashtra in 2016 that the men were dead.
Dange, a former RSS worker, is considered a bomb expert, has an Interpol red corner notice against him, and is on the most wanted list of the NIA along with Kalsangra and Amit Hakla. Dange and Kalsangara carry a Rs 10 lakh reward, and Amit alias Ashwini Chauhan carries a Rs 5 lakh reward on his head.
Suresh Nair has been described in the Lankesh case documents as being present at camps in Jalna, and in Ahmedabad’s Gujarat in 2015.
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Apart from Nair, one of the other “external trainers” at the camps for the Sanatan Santha-linked recruits accused in the Gauri Lankesh murder case has been identified as Pratap Hazra, who is linked to the right-wing Bhavani Sena outfit in West Bengal. He was arrested by the Maharashtra ATS in 2020 in connection with the Nalasapora terror case.
Further proof of nexus
A chargesheet filed in November 2018 by a Special Investigation Team of the Karnataka Police, which investigated the Gauri Lankesh murder, contains statements by three accused and four witnesses regarding the weapons training camps.
SIT has arrested 17 people linked to various fringe right-wing groups in connection with the murder of Gauri Lankesh, which was allegedly coordinated by those formerly associated with Sanatan Sanstha, an affiliate of the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, which allegedly created a crime syndicate to target critics of Hindutva.
In May this year, during the Gauri Lankesh case trial, one of the witnesses who had earlier informed a court that he attended training camps where outside experts also came, turned hostile and denied his earlier statements.
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The 37-year-old prosecution witness, who is involved in grassroots politics in Karnataka’s Belagavi, was declared hostile by the state special public prosecutor after he denied all the statements he had made before a magistrate in September 2018.
He denied recruiting and taking three people from Belagavi for a training camp in Maharashtra’s Jalna around January 2015, where a Belagavi man, who is an accused in the August 30, 2015, murder of Prof M M Kalburgi in Dharwad, was also allegedly a participant.
In 2018, the witness stated the presence of as many as four external trainers at some of the camps who were experts in the use of explosives and subversion tactics. The external trainers were only identified as “Bade Mahatmaji”, “Chote Mahatmaji” or “Bade Babaji”, and “Bhai Saab”, and their real identities were not revealed, he stated.
“The members of this crime syndicate were continuously provided with various kinds of training in the making and usage of weapons and explosives at many places. Local members of the syndicate took up the responsibility of organising these training camps at the different locations,” the SIT stated in the chargesheet in the Gauri Lankesh murder case.
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Among those accused in the Gabri Lankesh murder and other murder and terror cases who attended the training camps with “guest trainers” are allegedly Amit Degwekar, Virendra Tawade, Sharad Kalaskar, Shrikant Pangarkar, Vasudev Suryavanshi, Ganesh Miskin, Amit Baddi, Bharat Kurne, Sachin Andhure, and Praveen Chatur.
The descriptions of the “babajis” were provided in the course of the Lankesh case probe by three arrested men Shrikant Pangarkar, 40, a former Shiv Sena councillor from Maharashtra, Sharad Kalaskar, 26, the alleged shooter in the 2013 Narendra Dabholkar murder case, and Vasudev Suryavanshi, 29, a mechanic who allegedly stole motorcycles for the murders of four progressive thinkers between 2015 and 2017.
Sharad Kalaskar, who attended training camps of the syndicate where “guest trainers” were in attendance, was convicted last year in the murder of the Maharashtra rationalist Narendra Dabholkar in Pune. He provided details of the training camps he attended to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which investigated the Dabholkar murder case.
Terror cases, and murders of Gauri Lankesh, Dabholkar, Kalburgi
One of the arrested men in the Bengaluru case has stated that he was told that the “guest trainers” who were experts in making IEDs were members of the “Aseemanand group” in a possible reference to former RSS worker Naba Kumar Sarkar alias Aseemanand, who was arrested in the blast cases of the 2006-2008 period and was acquitted in the Samjhauta Express, Mecca Masjid, and Ajmer cases.
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According to the case documents, the camps provided training to dozens of people recruited by a covert unit of the Sanatan Sanstha linked to the murders of the rationalist Dabholkar, leftist thinker Govind Pansare, Kannada scholar M M Kalburgi, and Gauri Lankesh.
“The members of this organisation targeted persons whom they identified as inimical to their beliefs and ideology. The members strictly followed the guidelines and principles mentioned in ‘Kshatra Dharma Sadhana’, a book published by Sanatan Sanstha,” the SIT said after it filed a 9,235-page chargesheet on November 23, 2018, in the Gauri Lankesh case.
The missing Abhinav Bharat men who have been on the run since 2008 are believed to have been roped in to train Sanatan Sanstha-linked persons to make bombs when the ENT doctor and Sanatan Sanstha activist Virendra Tawade was running the covert group between 2011 and 2016.
At some training camps — such as the one held in Belagavi in Karnataka in December 2014 — the training in making IEDs was provided by Amit Degwekar, a resident of the Sanatan Sanstha ashram in Goa, who has been arrested in the Gauri Lankesh case for providing logistical and financial support, the Lankesh case documents have indicated.
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Degwekar’s roommate at the Sanatan Sanstha ashram, Malgonda Patil, was killed in the 2009 Goa blast while he was allegedly trying to plant a bomb to disrupt a Diwali celebration opposed by the Sanatan Sanstha.