Two more persons have been arrested in connection with the murder of Trinamool Congress leader Dulal Sarkar in Malda, taking the total number of people rounded up in the case to five.

All the five, who are in their early twenties, are suspected to be contract killers.

Sarkar, a councillor of Englishbazar municipality, had been gunned down on Thursday morning when he got out of the car in front of his plywood factory in Malda.

The two who were arrested during the past 24 hours are Amit Rajak, a milk vendor, and Abhijit Ghosh, who is a worker in a pipe manufacturing unit.

Amit, sources said, was arrested from the Mahanandapally area on Friday night. He lives in the Barrack Colony of Jhaljhalia and supplies milk from door to door. Occasionally, he and his brother Krishna alias Rohan stay at their grandmother’s house.

Police nabbed Amit from the house on Friday and sealed it. Rohan, police sources said, has been absconding since Sarkar’s death.

On Saturday, residents of Mahanandapally said over the past few days, Rohan and some other youths were seen staying at the house.

Sumana Modak, a homemaker of the locality, said Amit supplies milk in the area and is a submissive boy.

“His brother Rohan was living at their grandmother’s house (who died a few months back) with some other youths during the past few days. We had never seen these youths earlier,” she said.

These youths were seen collecting water from stand-posts and buying vegetables. “They used to move by a two-wheeler. Rohan once told us that they were his friends,” said another resident.

The house is barely 200 metres from the residence of Dulal Sarkar.

On Friday evening, the police raided the house.

“We felt something was wrong as Rohan has been missing since January 2 when Dulal Sarkar was murdered. Also, the youths staying with him were not found. It seems that the contract killers were living at the house to keep a watch of his (Sarkar’s) movement,” the resident added.

Police officers, when asked about the raid, were brief in their reaction. “The house has been sealed for a definite purpose,” said a police officer.

Abhijit, the other youth who has been arrested, gave up his studies after he had failed in Madhyamik three years ago and was working in a pipe-making unit.

He did not return home at night before the killing of Sarkar, said his parents. On January 2, he came home around 12.30pm, after around 14 hours.

Chaitali, the wife of Dulal Sarkar, who is also a councillor at the Englishbazar municipality, said she still believed that without the involvement of "influential persons,” it would not have been possible to murder her husband.

“I want the police to find out who had engaged these youths to kill my husband."