Justice Biswajit Basu of Calcutta High Court on Monday asked why the headmaster of the Narendrapur school, where some teachers were allegedly attacked by outsiders on January 27, couldn’t be arrested just because he had filed a plea for anticipatory bail at a lower court.
“It’s been over a week and police have failed to arrest the headmaster only because he has filed an anticipatory bail plea in a court?” Justice Basu said.
The judge said this after a lawyer representing the state government told the court that the headmaster had filed an anticipatory bail plea in an Alipore court.
The police submitted a report in the high court during the day stating that eight persons had been arrested so far for the alleged assault. Of them, six are among the 50 who have not been named in the FIR.
The headmaster is among the two accused who have been named in the FIR but are yet to be arrested.
On January 27, a group of youths had allegedly barged into classrooms and attacked a few teachers of the school in Narendrapur. The staff room was allegedly ransacked and the teachers were kept locked in a room till a police team reached the school and rescued them.
The attack followed allegations that a student of the school had been raped by a teacher and the institution had kept the incident under wraps.
Some teachers told the police they believed that the attack had been plotted by the headmaster, who wanted to force them to withdraw their complaint of irregularities against him. Outsiders, the teachers argued, could not have entered through the school’s gates without the headmaster’s approval.
The headmaster denied the allegations.
Lawyers said there was no bar on arresting an accused who has filed a plea for anticipatory bail. “Justice Basu was surprised because a few years back the apex court had spelt out that a plea for anticipatory bail could not come in the way of arresting an accused,” said a lawyer.