A Delhi court on Saturday issued a notice to the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on the bail plea moved by Trinamul Congress strongman Anubrata Mondal’s daughter Sukanya Mondal in connection with the alleged multicrore cattle smuggling scam in West Bengal.

Special judge of the Rouse Avenue Court, Raghubeer Singh, issued the notice to the probe agency and posted the matter for hearing on May 12, also the day Sukanya Mondal’s judicial custody ends. On April 27, a day after her arrest, the court had sent Mondal to three-day ED custody.

The ED had arrested Sukanya, a primary school teacher in West Bengal’s Birbhum district, after quizzing her for her alleged involvement in the case.

Her father Anubrata Mondal is also in judicial custody for his alleged involvement in the same case. Special public prosecutor Nitesh Rana had sought Sukanya Mondal’s custody, saying that she was required to be confronted with evidence and the co-accused, including her father.

Her custody was also required to trace the proceeds of crime, establish the money trail and the modus operandi, the ED had said. On April 26, the Delhi High Court had posted for June 1 Anubrata Mondal’s plea challenging a trial court order denying him bail in the same case. Earlier, Rana had said that Anubrata Mondal’s bail application lacked merit.

The ED had arrested Anubrata Mondal based on an FIR registered by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in Kolkata against Satish Kumar, the then Commandant of Border Security Force (BSF). ‘Anubrata raised money from zilla parishads’: In what is said to be a damning admission by one of Trinamul Congress’ Birbhum strongman Anubrata Mondal’s close lieutenant and a rice trader Rajib Bhattacharya, who the ED had interrogated, claimed that the Birbhum Trinamul district president used to raise money from zilla parishads too, an ED charge sheet claimed.

A source in the central agency claimed that Rajib Bhattacharya, who was a Trinamul Congress zonal president, was entrusted with the job by Mondal to oversee the business of rice mills. Saigal Hossain, the arrested personal bodyguard of Mondal too alleged, claimed an ED Charge sheet, that his phone used to be the gobetween cattle rustlers and Mondal and it was his phone that would take calls at the behest of Mondal from alleged cattle smugglers. Meanwhile, a source claimed that the central agency had found statements of Sukanya Mandol, daughter of Mondal, that were at variance with what his father claimed.

An ED source said while Sukanya passed the buck of her business deals to her father, claiming it was her father, who is in the know of everything. According to the charge sheet, Mondal claimed that he had done all things as advised by his chartered accountant friend Manish Kothari, who is now behind bars