Calcutta, Feb. 10: The government today ordered a judicial probe into Tuesday’s police firing on rampaging Forward Bloc supporters in Dinhata that left six dead.

“We have ordered a judicial probe into the February 5 police firing. The judge’s name and terms of reference are yet to be decided,” chief secretary Amit Kiran Deb said.

Officials said the chief minister would announce the name of the judge to conduct the probe and terms of reference after consultations with law minister Rabilal Moitra.

The chief minister’s media secretary announced the probe in the morning, apparently to keep it a low-key affair unlike the announcement after Rizwanur Rahman’s death. That probe had to be folded up after the high court ordered a CBI inquiry.

The court had also ordered a CBI inquiry into the Nandigram firing before the government could order a probe.

Bloc state secretary Ashok Ghosh had written to the chief minister yesterday demanding the inquiry, four days after Dinhata firing, apparently under pressure from the party’s local unit.

“I have come to know about the judicial probe from the media. The chief minister didn’t call me up after his return from Delhi,” Ghosh said today.

The Bloc leader said his

party was also demanding the withdrawal of police cases against party cadres accused of violence in Dinhata and punishment for officials responsible for the police firing.

The Bloc’s Cooch Behar unit secretary, Udayan Guha, has been accused of murder after the death of a National Volunteers Force jawan. He was beaten to death by the Bloc supporters.

Guha said he was “not happy” with the government’s “silence on our other demands”.

RSP state secretary De-babrata Bandopadhyay said: “The government should set a deadline for the judicial commission to complete its job. Otherwise, the fate of this investigation would be the same as the earlier commissions that continued investigations for years and their reports were dumped.’’

Although Ghosh has likened the Dinhata firing with Nandigram, where 14 people were killed on March 14, and called it “premeditated murder”, he has refused to criticise the government or walk out of it.

He has also not spoken a word against the chief minister, who holds the police portfolio.

The Opposition parties said the judicial probe would only help the government “put police highhandedness under the wraps”.

“A judicial probe is nothing but an attempt to hush up the case. The findings of many judicial commissions have not seen the light of day,” said Trinamul Congress MLA Partha Chatterjee.