For Ravi Belagere, gun mightier than pen?

Bengaluru: Three weeks ago, the alleged serial sharpshooter Shashidhar Mundevadigi from Vijayapura fell into the trap of the Special Investigation Team (SIT), which is investigating the sensational killing of journalist-cum-social activist Gauri Lankesh and has been sieving through the country’s prisons and crime hotspots for serial sharpshooters and illegal gun dealers.

There were celebrations in the SIT camp because they thought they had caught Gauri’s killer, but they soon realised that Shashidhar – an accused in three murder cases and an arms case – wasn’t the man they wanted. But what the sharpshooter said during interrogation sent shivers down the SIT spine. “The SIT had averted a major mishap – a third contract killing, of Suneel Heggaravalli, a journalist in Karnataka, a fatal blow to the Congress government, which is already facing heat for failing to protect rationalists and arrest the assassins of Kannada litterateur M.M. Kalburgi, who was killed in August 2015 and Lankesh, who was brought down on September 5 this year,” said sources, who didn’t wish to be named.

Shashidhar had told the SIT that he has allegedly been hired this time by Ravi Belagere – editor of vernacular tabloid, ‘Hai Bangalore’, to kill his colleague Sunil Heggarvalli for an alleged relationship with his second wife.  He gave a token amount and an illicit firearm to reserve his services.

Sunil was working for ‘Hai Bangalore’ and had left the tabloid to work for a Kannada TV channel. “Ravi was suspicious about the alleged affair and wanted to keep a watch on Sunil. He asked him to get back to the tabloid and later started planning his murder when his doubts were confirmed,” said the official source.

The sharpshooter’s claims were confirmed when the Central Crime Branch (CCB) of city police, which is assisting the SIT, arrested a gunrunner, Tahir Hussain alias Anoop Gowda, from Parapanna Agrahara police station limits on December 5. A resident of Chikkballapura in Bengaluru Rural, Hussain allegedly confessed to the CCB that he had given one illegal 7.65mm pistol to Shashi and one was with Ravi. Police seized one illicit 7.65mm pistol and three live cartridges from him. The SIT, say sources, then took Sunil into confidence and confronted him with the facts of their finding and asked him to go back to his office – ‘Hai Bangalore’ – and behave normally. “The CCB had to be very sure of what they had got and wanted to lay their hands on the third weapon, which was allegedly in Ravi’s possession. They obtained the search warrant from the court on Friday morning and searched Ravi’s house. They found a pistol and a double barrel gun. Armed with enough evidence they arrested him from his residence in Padmanabhanagar in the evening,” the sources said.

Though the SIT and CCB have seized three illegal 7.65mm pistols from the trio, it is too early to state whether one of them was used in killing Gauri.

Read | 2 guns, 53 rounds seized during raid

Belagere planned to kill me in 2014 itself: Heggarvalli

Sunil Heggarvalli, journalist and alleged target of media moghul Ravi Belagere's ire said his boss at Hai Bangalore' planned to eliminate him in December 2014, allegedly bringing criminals from Bheema Teera to do the job But, Heggaravalli said, the plan failed as he distanced himself from Belagere, after he grew suspicious about the plan.

Heggarvalli who went on to become Belagere’s man Friday after working with him for over a decade at the publication said, “had I not cut our decade-long association, I would be dead by now.”

“I was in constant fear of being killed since December 20, 2014 when Belagere lied about an investor’s meet and called me to the office. When I went, I saw a few criminals standing downstairs but I ignored them and went to Belagere’s cabin as I believed him blindly. I found him alone in his cab and asked about the investors. He changed the topic and talked about irrelevant matters. That’s the first time I suspected something fishy,” Heggarvalli recollected.

He said that after growing suspicious about the meet, he faked a call and went out of the cabin and called up a senior police officer who advised him to leave Belagere’s office right away. “It’s the same officer who after sometime called me up and asked me to share my location which he then revealed to Belagere! Belagere than called me up and asked to meet him at a hotel but I did not go there. He kept calling me repeatedly,  but I did not answer any of the calls,” he said.

That wasn’t the end of it. Heggarvalli went on to reveal that Belagere tried to bump him off by asking one of his friends to set up a car crash. When he was in Hassan, Heggarvalli said that there was a murder bid on him by Belagare’s friends who attempted "to crash his car into mine and make it look like an accident," which too failed. After this incident, Heggarvalli said he stopped talking to Belagere, until in September 2016 when Belagere himself called him when Heggarvalli launched a cable tv service.

“Since then, Belagere has many a time approached me to join him as he felt the quality of writing in his paper has become poor after I left the organisation. He even said his health is not good and he planned to shut the paper. But I kept turning down his offers,” Heggarvalli said.