The CBI on Sunday recovered one of the two cellphones of Trinamul Congress MLA Jiban Krishna Saha from the bottom of a pond that had been drained with three pump sets.

The agency pressed into service an earthmover to remove the silt from the bottom of the pond at Andi village in Saha's Burwan constituency in Murshidabad district in search of the second phone. Both the cellphones are suspected to contain important documents connected to the alleged school recruitment scam.

“After the pond was emptied, 14 people were engaged by CBI sleuths to search for the two gadgets in the mud. A worker found one of the cellphones in the mud and handed it over to the investigating officer. But despite a rigorous search in the silt, the labourers failed to find the second one,” said a source in the CBI.

“As the labourers were tired after working under the scorching sun for at least six hours, we finally hired an earthmover to take out the heaps of mud and trace the second cellphone,” he added.

The earthmover scoured the bottom of the pond for five hours and its operation was called off after dusk. A source said the search would resume on Monday morning.

Usually, an earthmover charges Rs 2,000-2,500 an hour to remove earth or debris. The charge is higher when it is involved in demolishing a concrete building or removing stone boulders from a mine.

The CBI that has been probing the alleged scam had raided the house of MLA Saha on Friday afternoon. His questioning completed 55 hours on Sunday evening.

The search for the mobile phones by the CBI drew large crowds. Many said they had never heard of an investigation that involved drying out a pond by deploying three pump sets, followed by engaging an earthmover to clear the mud.

The CBI sleuths suspected that Saha had gone to the rooftop of his house during the course of the investigation and thrown his two cellphones into the adjacent pond.

After one of the two cellphones was retrieved from the muddy pond, Saha was taken out of the residence by the investigators to reconstruct how he had thrown his gadgets into the pond to assess the possible location of the second mobile phone.

The CBI also summoned three local Trinamul leaders to the house of Saha to interrogate them to clear a few doubts connected to the scam.