Mofizul Haque. Picture by Amit Datta

Calcutta police on Sunday suspended an officer for flouting investigation norms in the case of an elderly man who hanged himself after being allegedly dragged to a police station and abused for not returning borrowed money.

Mofizul Haque killed himself on Saturday, hours after sub-inspector Pranab Kumar Dey Roy allowed an interrogation session at Watgunge police station where the complainant and his aide joined policemen in taunting and threatening him.

“We suspended him for not following the official procedure of examining a person in a police station. There was no mention in the general diary about Haque being summoned and examined for an hour,” the joint commissioner of police administration, Pradip Chatterjee, said.

Haque’s family said he was insulted to the point where he could not bear to live with it. It was all because of the Rs 5,000 that Haque had borrowed from his colleague Mahendra Mandal two years ago at a high rate of interest. The monthly repayment instalment was Rs 500, which the Watgunge resident missed the last two months.

On hearing that Haque had been taken for interrogation, his son Reazul and daughter Nilofar reached the police station and tried to protest. The policemen present there allegedly assaulted Reazul.

Mandal and his aide have been booked for abetment to suicide (Section 306 of the IPC). “The same charge has been brought against the cops, though we have yet to identify who they are,” Chatterjee said.