Hardly a day after the attempted shooting at Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) councillor Sushanta Ghosh at Kasba on Friday evening, the body of another councillor of the ruling party was recovered from the garret of his house on Saturday.
The deceased, Satyajit Bandyopadhyay was also the vice-chairman of the Barrackpore Municipality (North).
Preliminary investigation revealed that the incident might be a case of suicide. Police have seized a letter of two-and-a-half pages, beside the body of the vice-chairman.
Police officials of the north Barrackpore Police Commissionerate, investigating the case, treated the letter as a ‘suicide note’ in which names of four persons were mentioned.
According to sources, both in the family of the deceased and local Trinamul Congress unit, his body was found hanging in the garret this morning.
Sources also said he was ‘missing’ since Thursday and came back home on Friday night. But he went out for a short-while, leaving his mobile phone at home. He hasn’t spoken to anybody in his family since returning home on Friday midnight.
His family members claimed some people were trying to blackmail the Trinamul Congress councillor of ward eight by showing him fake videos. Details in connection with the fake videos and plan of blackmailing have also been mentioned in the letter, they claimed.
Ganesh Biswas, deputy commissioner of the commissionerate, told reporters, “Preliminary investigations have also started. We are exploring all aspects in connection with the incident. We will also verify whether the videos are fake or not.”
Local Trinamul Congress leadership denied any political connection in the incident.
Moloy Ghosh, chairman of the municipal body, said, “I met Satyajit on Thursday. He was there in the municipality for about two hours and held a meeting on Thursday. It’s a shocking incident and we want police to bring out the truth after proper investigation.”
“He used to stay in a rented house,” Mr Ghosh said.
According to police, the body has been sent for post-mortem and the nature of the death will be known after getting the report.
On 13 November, Ashok Shaw, a Trinamul Congress leader, was shot dead while he was sitting at a local tea stall at Bhatpara in the Barrackpore police commissionerate area.