Bikash Agarwal and (below) his father Bishnu Prasad. Pictures by Gopal Senapati

A Howrah businessman returning home with his wife after a late-night show of Ghajini was fatally shot in the stomach by a gunman waiting at the gate.

The assailant held a pistol to 41-year-old Bikash Agarwal’s abdomen and fired a solitary bullet before fleeing with an accomplice a little after midnight on Saturday. The victim’s wife Vandana, the only witness to the shooting, doesn’t remember anything else.

When the couple’s neighbours in the apartment building at 49/1 Dr Abani Dutta Road came out after hearing Vandana’s shrieks, a bleeding Bikash was on the ground with head nestled on his wife’s lap. He died while being shifted to AMRI Hospital in Dhakuria, around 15km away, after being first taken to Howrah District Hospital.

Bikash, who owned a sari showroom at Bandhaghat, had taken his wife to Paradise cinema on Bentinck Street to watch the Aamir Khan film about a partially amnesiac man’s hunt for a killer by the name of Ghajini. They took a taxi back to Howrah after the show.

Police said Bikash’s killer and his accomplice possibly knew when the couple would be back home. “Nobody except the victim and his wife saw them, but we presume the duo arrived in front of Brahma-Vishnu-Maheshwar Apartments well before Bikash and Vandana got off the taxi on GT Road around 12.30am,” Howrah superintendent of police Niraj Kumar Singh said.

As husband and wife chatted and walked towards the building, around 300 metres from the main road, neither saw the man with the gun lurking in the shadows until he lunged at Bikash.

The building’s guard, Ajoy Ghosh, told the police that he had heard Bikash call out his name before the gunshot rang out. “I was about to come out of my room to open the gate when I heard the gunshot. I froze,” he said.

As Ajoy opened the small gate next to the main one to see what had happened, some neighbours who were awake came running down the stairs. Dipak and his brother Krishna Shaw, who stay on the first floor, said they suspected someone had been shot in the vicinity of the building but realised it was Bikash only after seeing him.

The Agarwals’ two sons, 15-year-old Bhaibhav and 11-year-old Madhavendra, were in their flat and unaware of what had happened until someone rang their bell.

A patrol team from Golabari police station, 500 metres away, had also heard the gunshot and arrived in front of the building a few minutes later.

The policemen arranged for a taxi that took Bikash to Howrah District Hospital. The businessman was shifted to AMRI after the doctor on duty at the government hospital said he needed to be treated in a trauma-care section.

Bikash’s father Bishnu Prasad Agarwal said his son might have been a victim of mistaken identity. “We have no enemy. I think someone else was the target and my son was unlucky to be mistaken for that person.”

Neighbours described Bikash as a gentleman. “It beats me how anybody could have wanted a harmless person like him dead,” Dipak Shaw said.