The managing director of a printing press was allegedly at the wheel of the car that killed an Aliah University student and fled the scene on Sunday evening, police said.
A team from the Bidhannagar police commissionerate arrested Pratin Khanra from his in-laws’ house in northeast Kolkata’s Birati early on Tuesday, a senior officer of the commissionerate said.
The officer said they learnt that Khanra was at the wheel of the grey Toyota car that hit Shakil Ahmed, a final-year postgraduate student of geography, near the Aliah University campus after questioning two men.
One of the men, who had been taken in by a police team from a service centre, is said to have told the cops that he had been asked to drive the vehicle to the service centre to get it repaired.
The other man had handed the keys to the vehicle to the one who had driven it to the service centre, a senior officer of the police commissionerate said.
The police have not formally named the company that Khanra used to work for.
“Pratin Khanra has confessed that he was at the wheel of the vehicle during the accident,” an officer said.
The police have slapped multiple sections of the IPC on Khanra, including 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) and 279 (rash driving on a public way).
Khanra was produced in a Barasat court on Tuesday afternoon and remanded in police custody for six days.
On Monday, the cops had seized the Toyota car with a damaged front from the service centre off the Ruby crossing.
The cops first took in the man who had allegedly driven the car to the service centre and after questioning him, brought in the other man who had allegedly given the first man the keys to the vehicle.
Both men were let off after questioning, a senior officer of the commissionerate said.
Shakil died after being hit by a car that was moving at a high speed on a near-empty road near the university campus around 4.30pm. Shakil, who had left his hostel on the campus to travel home to Murshidabad district, was walking towards the main road in search of a vehicle to reach the Howrah station, friends said.
The police tracked down the car based on inputs from a civic police volunteer who was posted around 200m from the accident spot. None of the 70-odd CCTV cameras installed on the stretch of the road in front of Aliah University till the Ecospace intersection is functional for the past week.
The power supply to the cameras had been turned off because of maintenance work on the sewerage and drainage network by the New Town Kolkata Development Authority (NKDA).
On Monday, the NKDA, based on inputs provided by the New Town traffic guard, erected multiple speed-breakers in front of the campus.