The lawyer Milind Pakhale has filed a police complaint stating that an entry he made in the occupancy register at Ravi Bhavan, a government-run VIP guest house in Nagpur, has been manipulated. Pakhale is a prominent public figure, and is the convener of the Khairlanji Action Committee, formed after the 2006 massacre of Dalits in Khairlanji, Maharashtra. The judge Brijgopal Harkishan Loya, who died suddenly on the night intervening between 30 November and 1 December 2014 while on a visit to Nagpur, is reported to have been staying at Ravi Bhavan on his final night. Pakhale’s entry in the occupancy register appears just before two other entries that relate directly to Loya’s stay.
At the time of his death, Loya was presiding over the trial in the allegedly staged encounter killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh, in which Amit Shah, the current president of the Bharatiya Janata Party, was the main person accused. In reports published by The Caravan, numerous family members and associates of the late judge have raised questions regarding the circumstances of his death, and said that Loya reported attempts to influence his judgment in the Sohrabuddin case, including by Mohit Shah, then the chief justice of the Bombay High Court.
Pakhale filed the complaint on 20 December 2017 at Sadar police station in Nagpur. He has also sent a copy of the complaint to the executive engineer of the Public Works Department in Nagpur, which runs Ravi Bhavan. Nagpur police confirmed receipt of the complaint when contacted by The Caravan. The executive engineer told The Caravan that he had not been able to look into the issue because the state assembly was in session, and would only be able to get to it after Christmas.
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