CBI officers spent a better part of Friday handling multiple health complaints of arrested Trinamul Congress leader Anubrata Mondal before getting a chance to begin his interrogation in a cattle smuggling case. Mondal, the Birbhum district president of Trinamul, was taken to the Command Hospital of the Eastern Command at Alipore in Calcutta in the afternoon for a health check-up as he had been complaining of breathlessness since morning.

A team of doctors attended to Mondal — in a separate cabin at the hospital — and noted his complaints, including shortness of breath, uneven pulse and a nagging fistula before examining him thoroughly for over three hours.

Late in the evening, the team concluded that Mondal did not require hospitalisation, much to the relief of the investigators who could not get a proper chance to interrogate the Trinamul leader till his arrest on Thursday.

“We wanted to ensure that all of Mondal’s health parametres were taken care of and there was nothing that he could complain about before beginning the interrogation,” said a senior CBI official.

“The team of doctors has prescribed medicines which will be administered from time to time and there is nothing else that can come in the way of our interrogation of Mondal now,” the official added.

A section of CBI officers said Mondal’s questioning began hours after he had returned from the hospital and settled down in his lockup. The more intensive session has been lined up for Saturday, they said.The Trinamul leader had been complaining of his ill health since Thursday, soon after he had been formally arrested. In the CBI court in Asansol on Thursday, Mondal told judge Rajesh Chakraboty that he was not keeping well.

Taking cognisance of his statement, the court directed that Mondal undergo a health check-up after every 48 hours and remanded him in CBI custody for nine days.Once the court formalities were over, the 64-year-old leader (according to the arrest memo) was brought to the CBI’s Nizam Palace office in Calcutta from Asansol in the early hours of Friday and was lodged in a lockup on the 13th floor of the multi-storied building on AJC Bose Road.Sources in the central investigating agency said a doctor had first checked Mondal on his arrival in Calcutta. He was then taken to an air-conditioned room that has a lockup in its northeastern corner. An oxygen concentrator was kept ready beside his bed.

“Mondal went to sleep around 4 am and woke up a little after 9am,” the official said.

“He had tea and biscuits in the morning followed by breakfast. He told us that he had several medicines to take.” In the morning, one of Mondal’s staff members from his Chinar Park apartment in Newtown was brought in to help fix a nebuliser on the Trinamul leader.

Sources said Mondal had spoken to his daughter in Birbhum twice, on speaker, and then to the staff, trying to find out how the world outside, including his party, was reacting to his arrest.Towards the afternoon, when Mondal was brought out for his trip to the hospital, the Trinamul leader looked unfazed with the cacophony around him. He walked down a few metres from the building to the area where a car was parked and refused to answer questions that reporters hurled at him.In Bolpur, the plan to inaugurate a one-storey building, adjacent to Mondal’s Nichupatti home, to accommodate hundreds of visitors, who used to come to meet him every day, next Monday was cancelled.

Trinamul workers close to Mondal said the inaugural programme was postponed as the building would not be required for the time being because of the arrest of the leader.

“It was very shocking as the scenes at Keshtoda’s house changed within 24 hours of his arrest. The road in front of his house used to be crowded with multiple vehicles like cars and motorbikes every morning. Today (Friday), no one visited the place. Even no one had come to enquire about the situation at his house,” said a Trinamul worker known to be close to Mondal.

Mondal’s supporters and friends fondly call him Keshto.The Birbhum district headquarters of Trinamul in Bolpur wore a deserted look on Friday. Later in the day, around 2,000 Trinamul workers took out a rally in Bolpur to protest Mondal’s arrest.

(Additional reporting by Snehamoy Chakraborty)