The CBI on Monday questioned Nirmal Ghosh, the Trinamool Congress MLA from Panihati on the city’s northern fringes, for almost seven hours in connection with its ongoing probe into the rape and murder of the 31-year-old junior doctor at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital on August 9.

The family of the deceased doctor reside in Ghosh’s assembly constituency. The MLA had reached the hospital in the afternoon of August 9.

Ghosh is alleged to have expedited the junior doctor’s cremation.

Sources said the CBI wanted to know when Ghosh got the information about the doctor’s death and what prompted him to reach the hospital.

“The MLA was present outside the house of the deceased doctor even before the hearse reached at night. He was also there during the cremation and there are allegations that he expedited the process. We want to know his exact role,” said a senior officer.

Ghosh is the second Trinamool MLA whom the CBI has questioned after Sudipta Roy, the MLA from Serampore, and former chairman of the hospital’s Rogi Kalyan Samity.

CBI insiders said there were reasons to believe that the Panihati MLA met Sandip Ghosh, former principal of the hospital, on August 9.

“I did come across the principal but I did not attend any meeting with him,” Ghosh said after stepping out of the CBI’s CGO Complex office on Monday evening.

“I went to the hospital on August 9 because the victim is a resident of my assembly constituency,” he added.

Ghosh’s interrogation came within a day of Apurba Biswas, the professor of forensic medicine and toxicology of RG Kar, saying that a person claiming to be close to the deceased family had insisted on conducting the post-mortem in haste.

“He claimed if the post-mortem (of the junior doctor) wasn’t conducted there would be a bloodbath. This person was an ex-councillor,” Biswas told reporters on Sunday.

BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari has alleged that the person that Biswas was referring to was Sanjib Mukherjee, a former CPM councillor from Panihati, who later joined the Trinamool Congress. He “became a close associate of Panihati TMC MLA Nirmal Ghosh”, Adhikari wrote on X.

Sanjib has denied the allegation. “....Who am I to decide or even dictate when the post-mortem of the junior doctor will be conducted,” he said.

The CBI, which is also probing financial irregularities at RG Kar, told a special CBI court in Alipore on Monday that Sandip Ghosh, the former principal, was influential and the agency was waiting for the reports of cloning of seized data to reach them.

The court has sent Ghosh and three others arrested in the case to judicial custody for 14 days.