Police probing the death of 16-year-old Sk. Shan said on Tuesday that they received an email from the principal of Silver Point School in which she informed them of the purported sequence of events of Monday afternoon.
The email reportedly said the Class X student did not submit a mathematics project on Monday and the maths teacher said this would be reported to his father.
Shan was found lying on the ground inside the school compound on Monday afternoon. He was declared “brought dead” at AMRI Hospitals, Mukundapur. The police said he had fallen to his death from the fifth floor of the school building.
“The officer-in-charge of Kasba police station received an email from the school after 10pm on Monday, in which the school officials have described it (the boy’s fall) as an unfortunate incident. The email mentioned that the student did not bring his mathematics project, which was due on Monday, and when the teacher of the subject told him that this would be reported to his father, the student misbehaved with the teacher. The teacher then took him to the staff room to report his misbehaviour to the class teacher and asked him to stand outside the staffroom,” said a senior officer of Calcutta police.
“The boy was asked why he had not completed the project. He responded aggressively... a teacher told him that his father needs to be spoken to,” a school official said. The boy was asked to go to the classroom after a few minutes, the official said.
A team of officers went to the school on Tuesday with a dummy that was thrown from the fifth-floor spot from where Shan is suspected to have jumped.
An officer said they seized CCTV footage from the school. “Footage shows the boy standing outside the staff room holding his ears,” he said.
A school official, however, denied that Shan had been told to hold his ears.
Shan’s father had lodged an FIR on Monday night against the principal, vice-principal, class teacher and maths teacher for allegedly “killing” his son.
The father alleged that his son had been targeted by the school because he had led the “no school no fees” movement during the pandemic.
School officials countered this. “The father had led the ‘no school no fees’ movement during Covid. There was a petition with signatures of parents but we had said that they would have to pay certain fees because the school was conducting online classes. But all this was about three years back. Had the school targeted the child, we would have asked him to leave,” the official told Metro.
“Last July, we celebrated 25 years of the school and the boy played one of the main characters in the programme. His father came to see the programme, congratulated the teachers and took photographs. Even on May 8 this year, the father came for another school programme, where the
boy played a part, and congratulated teachers,” said the official.
The school will be closed while the investigation is being done on the campus, the official added.
The preliminary post-mortem report suggested that Shan suffered from multiple fractures on the right side of his body, including his skull, ribs, pelvis bone and forehead. The police said the cause of his death was because of “fall from a height”.
Soon after the body was released after post-mortem, his family, neighbours and some guardians took the body to Kasba police station and held a road blockade on the Rashbehari connector late on Tuesday, demanding action against the school authorities.
The blockade continued till late in the night.