Gauri Lankesh murder: With CCTVs a fail, can Rs 10 lakh lead to killers?

Bengaluru: The state government announced a bounty of Rs 10 lakh for anyone who can provide vital information on the assailants who killed journalist and activist, Gauri Lankesh as the SIT probing the murder case hit a brick wall with the grainy CCTV footage proving to be of little help in identifying the gun wielding motorbike borne assassin or assassins.

“The case, so far, is nothing but a blind murder case,” the team told this newspaper.

Shifting their focus, sources close to the investigation said that the SIT team which returned to Ms Lankesh's home to recreate the murder scene on Friday, now suspect that Ms. Lankesh's assassins may have come from outside Bengaluru and had probably holed out in one of the many lodges that dot the Bengaluru South and West divisions and may have even changed their place of residence many times over. Since Friday morning, special teams have fanned out to check on stayers at the lodges, focussing on people staying for a longer duration as it was suspected that the killers had been following Ms. Lankesh for the last 15-20 days before they struck on Tuesday night.

“We were sure to begin with that we would get clues about the killers through the CCTV footage. But, there were many white cars and scooters passing the frames. We couldn't identify Ms. Lankesh's car or the bike-borne assassins," a police source said, adding, "while city-based supari killers would be detained and interrogated, we have an eye of the outsiders too."

"We believe the assassins may be hired killers and had come to the city to execute their job 20-30 days ago," sources added.

Amid suspicions that the killers may not have checked out and had simply vanished using the the road leading out of Raja Rajeshwarinagar to the Mysore highway as their getaway route, investigators are looking to see if the same names surface in the registers of different lodges, and if any of them do not show up in the check out ledgers.