CALCUTTA: The double murder of a Sikh couple, Lakshmi and Rani Singh, on May 17 at Picnic Garden in Tiljala by 14 unknown assailants has once again caught the West Bengal police napping.

‘Though senior Intelligence and CID officials spoken to professed ignorance as 10 the identity of the Killers, informed sources told this correspondent that they were almost certain that the slickly conducted operation was the handiwork of a crack unit of the Punjab Police on the lookout for a runaway militant posing as a truck driver. (A posse of policemen from Punjab was, in fact, supposed to have reached Calcutta on Sunday on a “Secret assignment).

To bolster their theory, the “sources cited the sophisticated sand walkie talkie sets in “the | possession of the assailants. “Even their attire, as described by ‘eyewitnesses resembled that of

Commandos who knew exactly what they were doing. But the most significant aspect of the op cration was that the “killers” sped away with the victims’ bodies in the Maruti Gypsies they came in. Which is something no murderer would risk?

Thus even the Superintendent of Police, south 24Parganas, Narayan Ghose (in whose jurisdiction Tiljiala falls), admitted to newsmen. Also worth nothing was that unlike other annihilation squads they made no attempt to muffle or harm anyone else who came their way.

A section of the state police is expectedly up in arms against their Counterparts in Punjab on grounds that they should have been kept posted. Some misunderstanding in connection with past raids conducted by the Punjab police at Bhowanipore and Domjur (Howrah) without informing them.

State authorities were already in existence. At Domjur too, a Sikh was killed in a shootout near a dhaba with the Punjab Police.

Whereas the additional DG (CID), Kamal Mazumdar, told this correspondent that the State Intelligence Branch (IB) would be probing the identity of the killers, his counterpart in IB, AK Samanta, denied having anything to do with it. What became starkly evident in the process was that the slate government was not really all that serious about tracing the “killers.” For surely the IB would otherwise have stepped in.

Chief Secretary N.Knishnamurthy, however, said that the “killers” continued to be untraced, and that district borders were being scaled. Moves had also been initiated to thrash out matters with the Punjab Police across the table.

 

Article extracted from this publication >>  May 28, 1993