The Enforcement Directorate (ED) moved Calcutta High Court within hours of Sheikh Shahjahan's arrest on Thursday, saying it feared state police would destroy evidence against the accused and urged an immediate hearing on its plea of transferring the case to the CBI.

"The state police have arrested Sheikh Shahjahan and he is in their custody. We fear many important documents related to the case, which the ED is investigating into, may be tampered with," ED's counsel Dhiraj Trivedi told a division bench of Chief Justice T.S. Sivagnanam and Justice Hiranmay Bhattacharyya on Thursday.

Shahjahan's name had surfaced while the ED was probing into the alleged links of Jyoti Priya Mullick, the Trinamul leader and former minister of food and civil supplies, arrested earlier in this case, in the PDS scam.

The alleged irregularities in the supply of the public distribution system ran into several thousand crores and the central agency has been trying to trace the route that the proceeds of crime had allegedly taken.

Mullick was the president of the Trinamul's unit in North 24-Parganas when the alleged irregularities in the supply of ration took place, senior ED officials said adding that there were reasons to believe that Shahjahan, the undisputed leader from Sandeshkhali, had links with the arrested minister, who was made a forest minister in the new state cabinet.

"The search and seizure operation on January 5 at Shahjahan's house was aimed to find out documents related to his export business and check if the money that travelled across the borders was in any way connected to the proceeds of crime," said a senior ED official.

While Shahjahan was being shifted from Basirhat court to Bhabani Bhavan in Alipore towards afternoon, a team of senior ED officials in CGO Complex in Salt Lake remained huddled with legal experts discussing how the central investigating agency could get his custody.

Senior officials said accessing Shahjahan's mobile phones, for instance, was vital since he had allegedly used the devices to make over 20 calls ahead of the search and seizure operation by the team on January 5 at his house in Sarberia village in Sandeshkhali.

"But the CID will collect the details of his phone calls and his mobile phone sets and by the time we can get his custody, it may get too late," the senior official said, explaining the reason behind demanding a probe by the CBI.

While the central agency was casting aspersions on the state police, it tried to turn the tables on the ED questioning whether it had made made enough efforts in arresting Shahjahan and wondered what stopped the central investigating agency from taking initiative in rounding up the undisputed lord of Sandeshkhali.

"The state police had legal hurdles. But that wasn't the case for ED. So why didn't ED arrest Shahjahan?" Supratim Sarkar, the additional director general of police, had questioned while talking to the media about Shahjahan's arrest.