A realtor and his brother who allegedly assaulted a 55-year-old Kolkatan, now a US national, because he had not hired them to renovate his ancestral house or paid them any extortion money were arrested on Thursday, 10 days after the attack.
Police said Khokon Sardar and his brother Bhailo were arrested from a location on Lake Road and produced in court later in the day. They have been remanded in police custody till February 12.
Jishnu Nath, who lives in Seattle with his family, had arrived in Kolkata on January 17 to renovate his ancestral house at 161F Kankulia Road, near Golpark.
His departure has been delayed because of the injury he suffered from the assault on January 29.
“A local promoter named Khokon Sardar had been harassing my labourers for some time. We have been renovating the house on and off since 2022. The promoter’s men had been disturbing the labourers and enquiring about me. I came to Kolkata a few days ago to supervise the work and was scheduled to return to the US soon,” Nath had told The Telegraph last week.
According to Nath, Khokon had picked a fight with him on January 29 when he asked the promoter to remove debris-filled sacks that were lying along the boundary wall of the house.
Khokon had allegedly tried to “divert the matter” by demanding money as “chanda” (subscription).
When Nath declined to pay, he was allegedly dragged to a construction site nearby, where Sardar was executing a project, and beaten up.
The police had earlier arrested a man in connection with the assault. But the Sardar brothers, who are named in the FIR, had been at large till Thursday morning, the police said.
“I have heard about the arrests,” Nath told this newspaper on Thursday.
The Sardars have been booked under IPC sections related to extortion, causing grievous hurt, wrongful restraint, criminal intimidation and common intention.
An officer at Rabindra Sarobar police station, which made the arrests, said: “The arrests were made based on specific information about the two.”
Bhailo, who allegedly punched Nath in his left eye, told reporters two days after the US national lodged a police complaint that the dispute had been triggered by Nath’s verbal abuses aimed at him and his brother.
“He (Nath) abused me and my brother even after we assured him that we would remove the sacks that were kept along the boundary wall,” Bhailo had said. Kolkata has witnessed many incidents where citizens were threatened or attacked over contracts for repair or demolition work.Two years ago, two groups of men — both allegedly backed by the Trinamul Congress — had fought with rods and bamboo sticks in Lake Gardens, not far from Kankulia Road, apparently over a contract to demolish a three-storeyed building.
The daylight skirmish took place two blocks away from the house of veteran Trinamul MP Saugata Roy.
In 2017, the family of then Trinamul MP Sugata Bose, grandnephew of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, had been threatened by a gang of bike-borne men while the Boses were trying to get their ancestral home on Sarat Bose Road repaired. Reason: the family had not bought construction materials from the men.