Purulia, May 4: Suspected Maoists today shot dead a CPM leader and injured another in a Purulia village.

The incident took place in Bhomragarh in Bandwan, where CPM district secretariat member Rabindranath Kar and his wife Anandamoyee were burnt alive by rebels in December 2005.

Ganapati Bhadra, 45, a member of the CPM zonal committee in Bandwan, was shot several times in the stomach with a pistol.

Rampada Mandi, 42, who was riding pillion on Ganapati’s motorcycle, was also shot, but he escaped. Doctors at the Purulia district hospital said he was out of danger.

Inspector-general of police (law and order) Raj Kanojia said Bhadra, a distant relative of Kar, was a complainant in the 2005 case. “We had offered him security but he refused. He had not been staying at his Bhomragarh home of late. We don’t know why he went there today,” Kanojia said.

Mandi said he was accompanying Bhadra to Kuchia village, about 3km away, to attend a CPM meeting. “We started around 11.40am. When we reached the edge of the village, we saw three young men standing on the roadside.”

All three were dressed in shirts and trousers. One had a gamchha tied round his head while another wore a cap. As Bhadra rode past, one of them whipped out a pistol and shot him. “Ganapati fell with the bike. ‘Ami aar banchbona (I will not live),’ he said. At this point, the youth shot at me. He also shot Ganapati for the second time. I felt a searing pain in my stomach and turned around and ran back towards Bhomragarh,” Mandi said.

When he turned around, he saw two of the assailants riding towards the Jharkhand border, about 10km away, on a bike. The third man had left, probably on a bicycle that was parked under a tree. When villagers came, they saw four bullet marks on Bhadra’s body.

Bengal home secretary Asok Mohan Chakraborti said it was “the handiwork of Maoists.”