A Webley Scott revolver, which Amaresh used

Calcutta, Jan. 6: Calcutta police took more than seven hours to realise that a revolver had gone missing from a police station.

By the time the police came to know about it, Saswati Pal had been shot dead.

“There was negligence on the part of the constable who was issued the revolver. We have suspended him and a probe is on,” said police commissioner Gautam Mohan Chakrabarti.

An investigation into how Amaresh Kundu got access to a policeman’s service revolver revealed that being on friendly terms with cops could take anyone to a firearm.

“Amaresh’s job was to cook for constables at the police station mess. He was not supposed to enter any room in the police station without permission,” said a senior officer at the Lalbazar police headquarters.

Sunil Majhi, the constable whose revolver was stolen from an unlocked box, was a security guard of the police station’s additional officer-in-charge, Jayanta Chowdhury.

Majhi said he took off his holster and kept it in a box after completing night duty around 6am. “I came back from the barracks to join duty around 1pm, opened the box and found that the revolver was missing.”

Majhi had not even taken out the bullets from the Webley Scott revolver. “I was supposed to join duty six hours later, so I did not do it,” he told superiors. A senior officer said it was a serious offence.

An internal probe did not corroborate all of Majhi’s claims. “Amaresh was on the Visva-Bharati campus at 11.20am. He must have taken an express train that leaves Howrah station around 6.10am. We suspect he stole the revolver before 5.30,” an officer said.

The interrogation of other personnel at the police station revealed Majhi had gone to sleep around 4am, two hours before his duty was to end. Sources said this was regular practice at police stations and Amaresh was aware of it.

No one apparently saw Amaresh enter the room where the revolver was kept. But sources said he would not have been stopped even if he were spotted.

The officer said: “If an outsider has friendly relations with policemen, getting access to their revolvers and stealing them is not tough at all.”