The special task forces of Bihar and Bengal on Saturday detained 10 people from Calcutta’s northern and southeastern fringes for questioning over possible links with Thursday’s daring hospital shooting in Patna.
A joint Bengal-Bihar team raided a housing complex in New Town early in the morning and picked up five men. At night, Kolkata Police’s STF rounded up five more from a guesthouse in Anandapur after a daylong hunt.
Five gunmen had walked casually into the ICU at Paras Hospital in an upscale Patna neighbourhood on Thursday and shot dead ailing gangster Chandan Mishra, who was in police custody.
The joint police team raided two flats in separate blocks at the Shukhobrishti complex, in Action Area III of New Town, and took the detainees to an undisclosed location for questioning.
Sources said Bihar police had tracked multiple calls that prime accused Tauseef Badshah had made to certain people who, in turn, dialled numbers linked to cellphone towers in Calcutta. The information was shared with the Bengal STF and Kolkata Police.
A Bihar STF team that had arrived on Friday and its Bengal counterparts raided Shukhobrishti — which had four years ago witnessed a police encounter that killed two wanted criminals from Punjab — between 5.50am and 6.50am. The first stop was Block M-73.
The joint team visited a fourth-floor flat around 5.50am and took two men into custody. Next, it went to a second-floor flat in the adjoining Block M-70 and detained two other men.
“There was also a woman in the second-floor flat. The morning security guard said the officers let her off but seized her phone,” a guard said. “According to an entry in the register, the police left M-70 at 6.50am.”
While leaving with the detainees, the joint team picked up a fifth man after intercepting his SUV on the road outside Shukhobrishti, sources said.
City police sources said the Bihar police had tipped them off about a car entering Calcutta with some of the Patna murder suspects. But they provided little detail apart from the car’s number — registered in Bihar — and the info that it had been spotted on Durgapur Expressway.
A city STF team began scouring Calcutta since morning and spotted the car late in the evening, parked opposite a medicine store off Urbana in Anandapur.
Probing further, the team learnt that five people had checked into a nearby guesthouse. The STF went to the guesthouse and took them into custody. One of them was later shifted to hospital after he complained of illness.
Senior officers from Bengal and Bihar were unwilling to comment on the operations.
In Bengal, police bosses said they were unaware of any arrests and would comment only if someone connected with the Patna murder was arrested from Calcutta.
Sources said another Bihar STF team was in Purulia to question Sheru Singh, a Bihar gangster lodged in the district jail there.
Officers from Bihar said Sheru and Mishra had set up the Sheru-Chandan gang several years ago but later parted ways.
“It seems Sheru engaged Tauseef and his gang to murder Chandan at the hospital. All will be revealed only after Tauseef is arrested,” an officer in Patna said.
The raid brought back memories of an operation the Bengal STF had carried out inside Shukhobrishti in June 2021, gunning down two criminals from Punjab: Jaipal Singh Bhullar and Jaspreet Singh alias Jassi. An STF officer was injured in the gun battle.
Bhullar and Jassi had put up in a one-BHK apartment in Block B a month before the encounter.
Some Shukhobrishti residents and security guards said the group picked up by the police for questioning had been staying in the two rented flats for the past several months. But no one seemed to know much about them.
In Calcutta, police commissioner Manoj Verma said the force had received “inputs” about Mishra’s murder over the past few days and shared them with the Bidhannagar commissionerate, responsible for New Town.