By IANS,
Kolkata : A Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) activist Biman Ghosh was arrested Monday in the Midnapore skeleton case, which has already landed a former West Bengal minister in police custody.
“Biman Ghosh has been arrested as his name is in the first information report,” said K. Jayaraman, deputy inspector general, criminal investigation department (CID) of the state police.
Ghosh, arrested from a village under Salboni police station, has been remanded in police custody for seven days.
Jayaraman had earlier said the interrogation of Sushanta Ghosh, minister in the Left Front government for two decades and now a lawmaker from Garbeta assembly seat, had yielded information about the involvement of other politicians in the alleged killing of seven Trinamool Congress activists in West Midnapore district.
Jayaraman Monday answered in the negative when asked if the police had recovered the log book of the vehicle used by the former minister on the day of the incident – Sep 22, 2002. The police are looking for the book as its details may reveal his whereabouts on the day. A section of the media has been reporting that police have recovered the log book.
CID Sleuths, probing the case, also searched his house at Chandrakona Road in West Midnapore district.
Ghosh, sent to seven-day CID custody Aug 11 after a district court cancelled his anticipatory bail, is now admitted for high blood pressure in the Intensive Coronary Care Unit of a state-run city hospital .
A medical board formed for his treatment examined the CPI-M leader Monday. “He is stable and normal as of now,” said a spokesman of the SSKM hospital Monday. “Tomorrow the board members will again meet and take a final decision on when he can be released.”
Following Ghosh’s arrest, the CID Saturday conducted simultaneous searches at his houses in Chandrakona Road and Benachapra in West Midnapore and Minto Park in the city.
A fresh case was slapped against him under the Indian Telegraph Act after the sleuths found two wireless sets at his Chandrakona Road residence. Another case, under the Arms Act, has been lodged against his brother Prashanta following discovery of 16 rounds of ammunition from a room in which he stayed in the Ghoshs’ ancestral house at Benachapra.
It is alleged that on Sep 22, 2002, Ajay Acharya and some other members of the Trinamool Congress were attacked by 40 armed people allegedly belonging to the CPI-M.
Sushanta Ghosh was one of the 40 people named in the first information report (FIR) filed after the incident nine years back.
Seven of the Trinamool Congress members were brutally killed, the FIR said.
The victims, including Ajay Acharya, were untraceable since then. But June 4 this year, the skeletons were recovered from near a pond in Mallickdanga area, near Ghosh’s Benechapra house, and led to the arrest of two of his aides.
Ghosh himself took anticipatory bail after a villager, Shyamal Acharya, filed a police complaint that one of the skeletons was of his father, Ajay Acharya. Later DNA tests conducted by the Central Forensic Science Laboratory here have confirmed the identity of Acharya and that of another missing Trinamool worker, Swapan Singha alias Raju Singha.