Chandrima Gupta narrates her tale of “abduction, assault and robbery”

The driver of the A-Star in which Chandrima Gupta hitched a horror ride was arrested on Friday after police traced his employer by listing cars with variations of the registration number she had given.

Md Munir, 22, confessed to snatching two cellphones and a couple of gold rings from law student Chandrima on Monday but denied that there was a second woman passenger in the blue A-Star owned by an advocate from Santoshpur. He also contradicted her statement that she sprayed deodorant in his eyes to escape, the police said.

“We have recovered the stolen items but as of now there is no trace of the injured co-passenger from the complainant’s version of the incident,” said Damayanti Sen, the deputy commissioner of police in charge of the detective department.

Investigators were on Munir’s trail since Wednesday, when they confirmed that the registration number of the blue A-Star involved in the incident was “WB 06B 1459” and not “WB 06B 1456”, as noted down by Chandrima.

Md Munir at Lalbazar on Friday. (Bishwarup Dutta)

“When someone is memorising a long number in a hurry, he or she is most likely to go wrong with the last digit. Once our search for WB 06B 1456 drew a blank, we substituted 6 with 9 and asked the public vehicles department to run a second check. It clicked,” said an officer.

The owner of the blue A-Star, Birendra Narayan Roy, told the police on Wednesday that driver Munir had not reported for duty since Tuesday. Investigators then went to Munir’s Santoshpur house but didn’t find him there either. “We spoke to several drivers in the area and came to know that he was last seen in Jadavpur. We finally found him on Friday afternoon,” the officer said.

Munir told interrogators that he had dropped his employer at Bikash Bhawan, Bidhannagar, on Monday morning and was returning to Santoshpur when he spotted Chandrima, 21, standing in front of AMRI Hospitals in Salt Lake.

“She signalled for a lift and said ‘Gariahat jaabo (I will go to Gariahat)’ when I stopped. I opened the door and she hopped in,” he said.

So did he give her a lift with the intention of robbing her?

“I had no such plan until I glanced at the rear-view mirror and saw her taking out two cellphones from her bag. Greed got the better of me,” Munir confessed to the police.

The driver’s version of what happened after that matches that of Chandrima except that she was the only passenger and that there was no scuffle.

Munir said he did brandish a knife when he turned left from the Gariahat crossing and Chandrima started protesting, but he did not attempt to hurt her. “According to him, he didn’t have to use force because she quietly handed him her cellphones and rings after seeing the knife. He claims to have allowed her to go after getting what he wanted,” an investigator said.

The driver claimed he did not take the Rs 20 that he found in her purse. “This contradicts Chandrima’s version that she borrowed money from a stranger to return to her paying guest accommodation in Salt Lake,” the officer said.

Chandrima had lodged an FIR with Lake police station on Monday evening, several hours after the incident. The girl said a can of deodorant helped her escape from the clutches of the driver who “abducted, assaulted and robbed me along with another female passenger”.

The third-year student of Hazra Law College said she sprayed deodorant in the driver’s eyes and got off the A-Star on the Lake Gardens bridge, after which the car sped away with the other, “seriously injured” woman.

A senior officer in Lalbazar said Chandrima may have made up portions of the story to convince her worried parents, who live at Halisahar in North 24-Parganas, that she did not get into a “shuttle car” which had no other passenger.

Many women from Salt Lake are forced to hitch rides because of limited transport options.