Internal security agencies and the Maharashtra Police are re-examining the killing of a local businessman in Amaravati on June 21, to see if it was a hate crime, according to people familiar with the matter.
The reinvestigation comes in the wake of the savage ISIS-style killing of a tailor in Udaipur.
According to the people cited above, initial investigations have revealed that robbery was not the motive, as originally claimed by the local police, and that the victim, pharmacist Umesh Kolhe had, weeks before, expressed his support for suspended BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma whose comments on Prophet Mohammad have caused strife across the country. They add that a preliminary examination of the seized electronic devices of the attackers reveal that they (the attackers) may have been radicalized. There is no official confirmation of this yet.
The Amravati police has arrested five persons Mudassir Ahamad, Shahrukh Pathan, Abdul Taufiq Sheikh, Shoeb Khan and Ateeq Rashid for the killing but the people said a sixth, the mastermind behind the killing, is absconding.
Internal security agencies have received a report from the state DGP on Thursday and the people cited above said the NIA may take over the case.
Kolhe was returning from his medical equipment shop on a scooter when he was accosted by three young men on a bike and hacked to death. The victim’s son and wife, who were following him in another bike, could not save him and he died on the spot due to blood loss. The local police, however, classified the crime as robbery even though the killers did not even touch the bag which has some ₹35,000 in it, according to the people cited above.
With the threat of religious radicalization running high after the anti-Prophet remarks controversy, internal security agencies are now examining any throat slitting incident in the country in the past months so that the culprits and the conspirators are brought to justice.
Meanwhile, in the Udaipur killing the National Investigating Agency and internal security agencies have found that the killers who beheaded tailor Kanhiya Lal on June 26 were in touch with Dawat-e-Islami radicals in Karachi, Pakistan through Whatsapp groups, and social media , sometimes accessed over VPN servers.
While the seized electronic devices of those arrested in the Udaipur savage crime are being examined, it was found that one of the killers, Riyaz Attari had also travelled to Saudi Arabia for Umrah with his wife in 2019. Both Riyaz and Ghous Mohammad, the other killer, have Pakistan based Dawat-e-Islami Whatsapp group on their devices and have been in touch with people in Pakistan.
The investigators are now examining other individuals mentioned in their Whatsapp chats and groups; there are believed to be nearly 400 followers of Pakistan based Dawat-e-Islami in Rajasthan alone.