A CBI team found hard drives of CCTV cameras missing from the house of Lalan Sheikh — a close aide of the murdered Trinamul leader Bhadu Sheikh and a key accused in the Bogtui carnage case — during the course of its search inside the house on Thursday.

Lalan’s house is close to the one from where several bodies were recovered in Bogtui village in the outskirts of Rampurhat. His building was covered with CCTV cameras connected to a hard drive to store footage. But as the hard drive is missing, so is the footage.

A search of Lalan’s house and the CCTV footage would reveal several things, which some CBI officers enumerated:

• Who were frequent visitors to Lalan’s house?
• When did he leave his house on the evening of March 21 and with whom?
• How some of the houses, located barely 50m away, were set on fire in Bogtui village?
• Did Lalan return to his house that fateful night? If so, when?

“All these answers will remain unanswered since the footage can’t be retrieved. The house owner (Lalan) has been careful to remove the hard disk before leaving,” said a CBI source.

With no electronic evidence available, CBI officials searched the house for over two hours and clicked several photographs and collected a few documents instead.

The CBI team was in for another surprise when they entered the house —a pet dog who started barking from inside when a sleuth broke the lock of the metal door. The animal was left behind when the residents fled away.

As part of the ongoing probe, a CBI team went to Bogtui village on Thursday to conduct raids in the house of two accused of the carnage including Lalan Sheikh. They found four CCTV cameras installed in different positions outside the house and one camera’s lens was focussed towards a gutted house.

The CBI team held a small meeting and decided to break the lock of the house to search it for footage in presence of a deputy magistrate and two state police personnel.

A cameraman accompanied the team who videographed the entire raid. The team reached Lalan Sheikh’s house at around 11 am and continued the search till 1.10 pm. After recovering a few documents the sleuths sealed the house and left.

A source said they broke another locked house with a hope the hard drive to store CCTV footage would be there. “There was only a monitor. But the main unit of the computer was not there. It seemed that someone plugged out the unit in a hurry,” said a source.

CBI sources said the footage of those four CCTV cameras was vital as those were the only surveillance units in the village during the carnage.

They said they would start a case of tampering with evidence if they did not get the CCTV footage.

CBI officials had already collected the footage from hospital, police station and Bogtui more to find out the accused people. They suspects the mob which came and resorted violence in the village with arson and murder came from hospital and most of them were the people closed to Bhadu Sheikh who came back for retaliation.

If they got CCTV footage of the house of Lalan Sheikh, it would be easier for them to trace out the criminals.

CBI on Thursday quizzed four fire brigade officials in its camp office and a police officer of Rampurhat police station who was on duty. The CBI officials wanted to verify the versions of fire officials and police regarding time of communication and the exact situation of the night of carnage.

The cops had so far seized six mobile phones including one of Anarul and another of the suspected IC Tridip Pramanik.

Local Trinamul leaders with permission of the administration on Thursday shifted 13 girls examinees who would sit for higher secondary examination on Saturday to a private residential school in Rampurhat town in a bid to provide them a safe and secure place for their study. The girls went with their mothers to the school where the Trinamul leaders assured to provide all types of help including private tutors.

“There is no issue of violence in the village but the higher secondary examinees, mainly the girls, can't concentrate on their studies because of fear. So, we shifted them to a safe and secured location,” said Syed Siraj Zimmi, current Trinamul block president of Rampurhat I.

Bhadu murder case

Birbhum police on Thursday arrested two more persons involved in murder of Trinamul deputy chief of Barshal gram panchayat Bhadu Sheikh. The duo Bhasan Sheikh and Safique Sheikh were produced before the additional chief judicial magistrate court in Rampurhat which granted them police custody for nine days. Police had arrested six persons in connection of Bhadu Sheikh murder case so far.

“The names of these two accused were not in the FIR. Police had found their names in interrogation. Police had also added arms act in the case,” said Surajit Sinha, the assistant public prosecutor of Rampurhat court.