For Lingayat Seer's Death Over "Honeytrap", Bengaluru Woman Among 3 Detained

Three people, including a woman from Bengaluru, have been detained in connection with Lingayat seer Basavalinga Swami's death by suicide, news agency PTI has reported quoting the police.

They are being questioned for allegedly abetting the suicide as his suicide note said he was being "blackmailed" and "harassed" over some private videos. 

“An unknown woman has done this to me,” said a line in the suicide note, sources in the probe team have told NDTV.

The 45-year-old seer was found hanging from his prayer room's window grille at Kanchugal Bande Mutt, which he headed, in a village in Ramanagara district last Monday.

He was “honeytrapped” and being blackmailed over “obscene video calls” with a woman, police had said. "Two names in the suicide note are connected to the mutt," investigators told NDTV.

“Private moments of the woman and the seer were captured by the woman using her phone's screen-recording function,” sources had said.

“We are investigating every angle possible,” the district police chief had said to questions, “There are four videos doing the rounds. These videos are of obscene nature.”

The seer had taken over the 400-year-old mutt's chiefship at the age of 20 in 1997, and recently celebrated the silver jubilee.

The Lingayat sect, which has a number of centres in Karnataka and some neighbouring states, forms a powerful 17 per cent of Karnataka's population, giving it heft across spheres, particularly in politics.