Burdwan, Jan. 2: The missing head of CPM leader Sisir Chatterjee was found hanging from a bamboo post in a paddy field today.

Villagers found the head, wrapped in a plastic sheet, around a kilometre and half from his house at Kanaidanga. Police said it was hanging from a nail.

Leaflets strewn around suggested the hand of a little-known Naxalite faction called the COC CPI(ML) in the murder in Mangalkot last evening.

Katwa subdivisional police officer Haroon Al Rashid said: “The outfit is active in pockets of Mangalkot. It has no link with Maoists.”

Chatterjee, a CPM zonal committee member, was riding pillion on party colleague Bablu Ghosh’s cycle on the way home from a meeting when a group armed with sharp weapons and rods stop- ped them. The assailants slashed Chatterjee’s throat and beheaded him. Bablu was thrashed and left unconscious.

Bablu told the police at Katwa Subdivisional Hospital today that there were five assailants.

Four persons, all residents of Kanaidanga, have been arrested.

Inspector-general of police (law and order) Raj Kanojia said in Calcutta: “Available evidence does not suggest Maoist involvement.”

One of the posters left behind by the suspected killers said in Bengali: “Plunge into an armed class struggle unitedly to fight for justice.”

SDPO Rashid said another leaflet named the CPM’s Ajoy-Bhagirathi zonal committee secretary, Durjodhan Sar, and member Nikhil Mondal as “class enemies”. Names of some local landowners also figured on the hit list.

Sniffer dog Rustam was taken to the village, 170km from Calcutta, where the head was found. Another dog, Steffy, was yesterday taken to the spot where Sisir was killed.

The secretary of the CPM’s Burdwan district committee, Amal Haldar, said Naxalites had killed two zonal committee members — Haraprasad Goswami and Gopeswar Pal — in 1994. “They were cut into pieces.”

“We can’t say whether the same outfit killed Sisir. We aren’t scared. We’ll fight them politically,” said Haldar.

Chatterjee’s body was brought to the party office at Mangalkot today after post-mortem and taken for the funeral in a procession.