The young men arrested in connection with the death of a first-year Jadavpur University student are allegedly “not cooperating” with police.
The accused are diverting investigation by sharing “similar type of narratives in a particular pattern which appears to have been tutored”, the public prosecutor said in court on Saturday.
Three men — two former students and a student of JU — who were arrested on Friday night were produced before court on Saturday.
On Friday, five of the arrested were taken to the main hostel building one by one and asked to reconstruct the exact sequence of events on the night of August 9.
Referring to the “reconstruction” episode, the public prosecutor submitted before court that the accused were deliberately making inconsistent statements to confuse the police and in the end saying they were not present at the spot at all.
“They are successful criminals but failed actors,” the public prosecutor said.
Sources in the police said all the accused who were taken for the reconstruction on Friday were allegedly making “misleading statements”.
“They are changing their versions every minute. There is a pattern in which all of them are speaking. It appears that all this has been decided during the general body meetings they held inside the hostel immediately after the death of the 17-year-old,” said an officer.
Investigators said they had found that a general body meeting started around 11.55pm on August 9 (around half an hour after the first-year student fell to his death), in which one of the arrested former JU students, Sourav Chowdhury, allegedly took the lead and “briefed” the remaining students on “what to say”.
An investigator said: “Sourav Chowdhury said at the general body meeting: ‘ja bolchhi shune jao, no cross question (just listen to what I am saying, no one should question)’”.
The police said Himanshu Karmakar, one of the three arrested on Friday, had accompanied the injured victim to the hospital and had held a meeting with Sheikh Naseem Akhtar — the second to be arrested on Friday — after returning from the hospital. After that, they decided to leave the campus, the police said.
Naseem’s lawyer, however, said his client lost his grandparent on August 10 and so he had to leave for his hometown.
The defence lawyer of Satyabrata Roy, the third to be arrested on Friday, said his client had “cooperated”.
“My client responded and went to meet the police when he was summoned with a notice to appear as a witness in the case. But he was arrested instead. My client has been cooperating all through,” the lawyer said.
After hearing both sides, the court sent the trio to police remand till August 31.
Kolkata police commissioner Vineet Goyal questioned some of the arrested youths in his office at Lalbazar on Saturday evening.
Till Saturday, 12 persons had been arrested in connection with the death of the first-year student. All of them have been charged with murder and common intention.
The police said the forensic wing of the special task force of Kolkata police had been engaged to examine the seized mobile phones of the victim and the accused.
“The fact that the victim’s mobile phone was in the possession of his attackers after he was injured has to be kept in mind. We cannot rule out tampering of evidence. A forensic exam of the victim’s phone will be carried out to check if he had sent any message about his condition or if any of his messages have been deleted. The phones of the accused will also be examined,” said the officer.
One more held
A former JU student, Joydip Ghosh, was arrested on Saturday for allegedly stopping police from entering the main hostel campus after the first-year student fell to his death on the night of August 9.