A CPM youth leader was on Saturday arrested for allegedly plotting an attack on the doctors’ protest against the RG Kar brutality.
DYFI leader Kalatan Dasgupta was arrested on Saturday morning, police said.
This is the second arrest in the case, which came to the fore on Friday after Trinamul leader Kunal Ghosh played an audio clip in which two persons were heard “planning an attack on the protest site”.
Another suspect, Sanjib Das, a resident of Haltu Garden Road in Kasba, was picked up on Friday.
The police on Saturday said they had verified the authenticity of the audio clip. The two persons heard in the clip were Das and Dasgupta, a senior officer said.
“There was a conspiracy to hire professional criminals for an attack on the site near Swasthya Bhavan, where junior doctors have been protesting. The audio clip has a conversation between two people. One of them is Sanjib Das and the other person is Kalatan Dasgupta. The clip was circulated in the media on Friday,” Aneesh Sarkar, deputy commissioner of the Bidhannagar commissionerate, told a news conference.
“Let me clarify first that since we got the clip, the technical analysis wing and the investigation wing have checked its authenticity. There is no doubt about the authenticity of the clip,” Sarkar said.
The technical analysis wing functions under the Bidhannagar commissionerate. The police did not clarify if the clip was checked by an independent agency.
“Sanjib Das was arrested yesterday (Friday). During the initial interrogation, he confessed that one of the voices in the clip was his. Today, we have arrested Kalatan Dasgupta. We will produce both of them in court. We will also submit the findings of the technical analysis in court. We will seek 14 days’ police custody for both. We want to collect their voice samples and match them with the clip,” Sarkar said.
Das and Dasgupta were later produced in a Salt Lake court that sent them to a seven-day police remand.
The two have been charged with several sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, including Sections 224 (threatening to harm a public servant), 352 (insults provoking a breach of peace and public order) and 353 (spreading false information that can incite enmity or hatred between different groups), said a senior officer.
The conversation in the clip mentions “Dadu”, “Bappa” and “Saheb”. Sarkar said the police were trying to find out who these people were.
The police have said that the conspiracy was being hatched at the time a delegation of the protesting junior doctors went to Nabanna to meet the chief minister on Thursday. The meeting was scuttled over the doctors’ demand to live-stream the proceedings, which the administration refused, saying that it was linked to a sub-judice matter being heard in the Supreme Court.
Dasgupta said he was called to Lalbazar before being arrested. He pointed to a “deep-rooted conspiracy” to implicate him. CPM leader Sujan Chakraborty echoed him.
“This is a deep-rooted political conspiracy. Trinamool shared a clip first. The police arrested him soon after that. The chain of events clearly suggests a nexus between the two,” Chakraborty told this newspaper.