Dharmasthala mass burial case: SIT halts excavation till DNA test result comes

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The Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing into the alleged burial of bodies in Dharmasthala village more than a decade ago, halted excavation into the case on Monday till DNA test result comes out.

Dharmasthala is a temple town in Dakshina Kannada district of Karnataka. It made to headlines when an was FIR filed by a former sanitation worker, the complainant in the case, on July 4.

The man, a former sanitation worker who had once cleaned the banks of the Nethravathi river, alleged that he had been coerced into burying and burning the bodies of numerous rape and murder victims, most of them women and schoolgirls, between 1995 and 2014, according to a report by The New Indian Express.

For nearly a decade, the man had been on the run. The whistleblower, whose identity has been kept confidential under the Witness Protection Act, first reached out to lawyers Ojaswi Gowda and Sachin Deshpande. On June 22, the lawyers released a press statement and said that their client was ready to lead investigators to burial sites, The New Indian Express reported.
The village is located in Belthangady taluk of Dakshina Kannada district.

The SIT took over the probe from the local police on July 25, and has initiated the digging of sites identified by the former sanitation worker. The team is also focusing on verifying the complainant's narrative.

The process of digging up the sites started on July 29. The SIT has made progress. Advocate N Manjunath, who represents Sujata Bhat, mother of a missing medical student, said that the SIT has recovered items like a pan card and two ATM cards.

During the excavation at the 6th site, they made further progress with bones being found at the site. The SIT has opted to videograph the entire exhumation process as part of the official documentation, HT reported.

In response to the allegations, officials from the Dharmasthala Grama Panchayat clarified that over 200 unclaimed or unidentified bodies have been buried in various parts of the village since 1995.

In the absence of a formal burial ground, such burials reportedly took place along riverbanks, forest fringes, and government land, following legal procedures in cases where cremation was not possible, PTI reported.

Police have maintained that the investigation is being carried out based on “documentary evidence” and “field-level inputs”. Any further action will depend on the outcome of the forensic analysis.