Udupi: The Udupi sessions court has given 15 days' conditional bail to Nandalike Niranjan Bhat, 30, the accused in the murder of businessman Bhaskar Shetty. Bhat had been in prison for four years, unable to get bail.
His father Srinivas Bhat, who had been accused of destroying evidence of the case, died of ill-health on June 22. Since Niranjan Bhat is the only son of Srinivas Bhat, he had requested for conditional bail to conduct the last rites of his father.
Justice C M Joshi, Udupi district and sessions judge, has granted Bhat bail. While the District Magistrate's court granted bail on June 24. The court has ordered that Bhat submit a bond of Rs 5 lakh for the conditional bail, appear in court, and submit himself to judicial custody on July 7.
Bhat, who is currently in the Parappana Agrahara Jail, Bengaluru, is likely to be released on conditional bail on June 25, said sources.
Bhat has been accused of murdering Bhaskar Shetty along with his wife and son at his house in Indrali on July 28, 2016, before burning the bodies. The police arrested him on August 8, 2016. Bhat had tried to kill himself by swallowing his diamond ring and earrings.
Srinivas Bhat and Raghavendra had been arrested on August 11, 2016, for the destruction of evidence of the case. The Udupi District and Sessions Court had granted them bail on October 1, 2016.
Srinivas Bhat, who had been suffering from ill-health for some years, failed to present himself for the hearings. The court had rejected Niranjan Bhat's plea for a month's bail to take care of his father on August 9, 2019, but has granted him conditional bail after four years.
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New Delhi: Gurugram Police have arrested BJP Yuva Morcha member Hariom Mishra, for allegedly spreading a fabricated and communally sensitive story on social media about the murder of a college student in Gurugram.
Mishra who is also known as Shaurya Mishra had shared a collage of four photographs on his X handle earlier this month. He claimed that a 24-year-old college student, identified as Nikita Agarwal, had been murdered by her classmate Arif Khan in Gurugram. In the post, he alleged that the woman was blackmailed, forced into prostitution, gangraped, and eventually killed. He also claimed that Arif dumped her body in a forest. The claims were presented as being based on police sources.
The post went viral and garnering over 1.5 lakh views, and was amplified by several right-wing social media handles across X, Facebook and Instagram. A verification of the claims revealed that no such incident had taken place in Gurugram. A search of credible news reports showed no record of any such murder. The police said this news would have inevitably attracted media attention if it were true.
On December 11, Gurugram Police publicly refuted the claims through their official X handle. They stated that the information which was being circulated was completely false. The police warned that legal action would be taken against those spreading misinformation. Despite the warning, Mishra neither deleted the post nor issued any clarification.
Police in Gurugram confirmed Mishra's arrest on December 16. The police said a FIR was filed after he continued to spread false information about the alleged murder of a Hindu woman by Muslim man. Police said Mishra, a resident of Uttar Pradesh's Kaushambi district, is now being investigated.
Gurugram Police spokesperson Sandeep Singh told The Print that the accused had deliberately misrepresented facts and used objectionable content to spread hatred along religious lines. “Such posts can create serious disturbances in society, and the police take these matters very seriously,” he said.
A reverse image search conducted by fact-checkers at Alt News, revealed that the photographs used in the viral post were unrelated to the claims, while two of the images were traced to a Pinterest account belonging to influencer Maulik Chopra and another image was sourced from an Instagram post by influencer Shivam Thakur featuring a woman named Deepanshi Rawat. The fourth image was found on an unrelated Instagram page. The images depicted different individuals and had no connection to any crime.
Police said they are also investigating Mishra’s motive behind sharing the false and provocative content.
