Gulzar Khan, who police said had hatched the failed plot to kill Trinamool Congress councillor Sushanta Ghosh, reportedly told officers that he wanted to take revenge because the leader had allegedly grabbed a 2,000-sqft godown that he owned in Anandapur’s Gulshan Colony.

Khan, who was arrested in Burdwan’s Galsi on Saturday, was produced in a city court on Sunday and remanded in police custody.

Khan told the cops that he bought the Gulshan Colony godown on his return from Dubai, where he had worked for a few years.

“He has alleged that the councillor used a local henchman named Haider to grab the godown and he was assaulted when he tried to resist. We are verifying his statement,” said an officer involved in the investigation into the attempt on the councillor’s life.

Ghosh, the councillor of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation’s Ward 108 and chairman of borough XII, did not answer phone calls or respond to text messages from this newspaper seeking his reaction to the allegation.

The leader was speaking to acquaintances in front of his house in Kasba’s Rajdanga on Friday night when a man, who the police later identified as Yuvraj Singh, got off a scooter and tried to fire at him. But the gun did not fire.

The man tried to flee on the two-wheeler but was caught by Ghosh and his acquaintances.

The police said Khan had contacted a criminal named Iqbal in Bihar, who put Singh, allegedly a hired assassin, and two others on the job. All three had come to Calcutta.

The police said they suspect that Khan was the mastermind. “But we are not ruling out the possibility of someone exploiting Khan’s animosity towards Ghosh and instigating him to plot the councillor’s murder. We are investigating all angles,” said an officer in the detective department of Kolkata Police.

Investigators said Iqbal had arranged the arms brought for the attack.

Senior officers said it was unlikely that the attack’s motive was only to threaten Ghosh.

Singh was carrying a gun loaded with eight bullets. That apart, he was carrying a magazine containing eight cartridges.

Singh reportedly told the police that the man who was riding the scooter was carrying a 9mm pistol.

Cops on Sunday searched a canal near Rajdanga for the gun that Singh said his accomplice was carrying. No weapon was found.

The city police have contacted the Bihar cops and sought details about Iqbal, who officers said has multiple criminal cases against him.

In the court on Sunday, the prosecution said the police would have to reconstruct the entire sequence of events leading to the attack and for that, a team would have to visit Bihar.

A CCTV footage that purportedly captured the attempt on Ghosh shows two men riding a scooter wearing helmets in front of Ghosh’s home. One of them jumps off the scooter and points a gun at Ghosh.

Moments later the youth tries to run away and get on the fleeing scooter but is caught. He was later handed to the police.