Sushanta Ghosh, Trinamul councillor of Kolkata Municipal Corporation’s ward 108 and chairman of borough XII, survived three attempts on his life between July and November last year.
Dulal Sarkar, Trinamul councillor from Malda’s Englishbazar Municipality, fell to bullets of bike-borne assailants off the Malda-Kotwali highway in the town’s Jhaljhalia area on Thursday morning, after surviving a similar attempt 18 years ago.
A day after the murder of his party colleague, the Kolkata councillor Ghosh declined to comment on the Malda incident. His followers in the area said the party had instructed him to keep a low profile since the attack and not to speak about it.
“We are worried about his [Ghosh’s] safety after the incident in Malda. Little progress seems to have been made in the probe over the last two months,” said a Trinamul leader from Kasba close to Ghosh.
On the evening of November 15, Ghosh was speaking with some acquaintances outside his home near Acropolis Mall in Kasba’s Rajdanga area in south Kolkata when a man, later identified as Yuvraj Singh, got off a scooter and aimed a gun at the councillor.
The gun jammed, the bullet did not fire. Ghosh chased the assailants. Singh was nabbed while trying to flee and handed over to the cops. The other person on the scooter is yet to be traced.
“One of the assailants was caught by Sushanta da and handed over to the police. Couple of more arrests were made, but since then we haven’t heard anything further,” said the Kasba Trinamul leader. “We are not sure what the Kolkata Police are doing.”
Apart from Singh, a taxi driver named Ahmed Khan and the alleged mastermind Gulzar Khan, a scrap-dealer from Anandapur’s Gulshan Colony, were the other two arrests made in the case.
Those close to the ward 108 councillor said why the assailants had targeted Ghosh was still not clear to them.
During the course of the investigation, the police had claimed the gang had targeted Ghosh in July and during Durga Puja, but could not carry out the act.
Ghosh, who carries bullet marks from two previous attacks in 1993 and 2002, had earlier asked why the police could not find the motive behind the attack.
Both the attacks – on Ghosh in Kolkata and on Sarkar in Malda on Thursday – were caught on camera.
The Malda police have arrested seven people in the case. Two among them, an Englishbazar resident Tinku Ghosh and another resident from Bihar’s Katihar Mohammad Shami Akhter, were arrested on Thursday night.
The remaining five were picked up on Friday morning from Englishbazar.
Soon after Thursday’s daylight murder where the ruling party leader was followed and chased into a showroom before being gunned down, chief minister Mamata Banerjee had blamed the district police.
“The district police had withdrawn his security. He was an old party worker and had earlier faced attacks. It is because of the lapses on the part of the police that he lost his life,” the chief minister had said during an administrative review meeting at the state secretariat in Howrah.
The municipal affairs minister and Kolkata mayor Firhad Hakim, who was sent to Malda on Mamata’s order, said neither the chief minister nor he was aware of Sarkar’s security being withdrawn.
Like in the attempt on Ghosh, the motive behind Sarkar’s murder is yet to be unravelled.
