A team of officers from the CBI’s special crime branch in the city left for Rampurhat on Friday evening within hours of Calcutta High Court handing over the probe into the killing of eight persons in Birbhum’s Bogtui village.

A division bench of the high court comprising Chief Justice Prakash Shrivastava and Justice R. Bharadwaj has directed the central investigating agency to file a progress report by April 7 and senior officers said they would want to start the probe from early Saturday morning. They would first visit the site from where the bodies were recovered.

A source in the central agency said the team members would like to have experts from the Central Forensic Science Laboratory accompanying them to Bogtui on Saturday. The CFSL experts were to the site of the massacre on Friday afternoon.

The forensic finding is crucial to determine if the eight victims had been murdered first and then set on fire or they had been charred to death.

“There are several aspects. The investigators will visit the houses that were torched, take pictures, try talking to some of the local residents and then reconstruct the series of events leading to the murder (of Bhadu Sheikh) and the subsequent arson on the first day of the probe,” said a senior officer.

Ahead of the team’s departure for Rampurhat, officers of the special crime branch led by a senior officer of the rank of deputy inspector general of police met briefly at the Salt Lake office to draw up a blueprint of how they wanted to go ahead with the investigation. Sources said a senior officer of the rank of joint director was likely to oversee the investigation.

By Friday evening, the CBI collected a copy of the FIR that the state’s Special Investigation Team had lodged suo motu at Rampurhat police station in the wake of the killings.

On March 22, the SIT had drawn up a criminal case under several sections of the IPC, including murder, attempt to murder, arson, setting houses on fire and criminal conspiracy, after lodging an FIR in the case relating to the murder of Bhadu Sheikh, a deputy panchayat pradhan, and the subsequent killings of eight villagers.

The FIR names 22 people and the CBI officers said they wanted to look at it.

“Over the course of the next few days, the team members would like to question Anarul Hossain since he was the block president of the ruling party in Rampurhat,” the officer said.

“We would like to understand the exact nature of his involvement in this particular crime.”

Senior officers of the SIT on Friday instructed Rampurhat police to extend all cooperation to the CBI in the probe. Officers have been asked to hand over details of the case diary and the findings of the probe so far to the CBI team within 48 hours.