A 17-year-old boy was stabbed to death, allegedly by a schoolmate, near the ticket counters at Dakshineswar Metro station around 2.30 on Friday afternoon.
Victim Monojit Yadav was a Class XI student at Bagbazar High School, police said, and was returning home with a group of boys from his school.
Quoting eyewitnesses, officers said a scuffle had broken out among the boys, following which one of them stabbed Monojit multiple times, leaving the floor spattered in blood.
Scores of passengers as well as Metro personnel and guards at the Blue Line’s northern terminal watched the scene in horror.
Police said late on Friday night that a suspect, who is a fellow student, had been arrested from Howrah station.
Eyewitnesses said the scuffle had broken out in front of ticket counters 6, 7 and 8. The students were in their school uniform.
“Suddenly, one of the students took a sharp object out of his bag and stabbed Monojit multiple times. He slumped to the ground,” a police officer said.
“There was a lot of commotion, with people running helter-skelter. The attacker escaped. Railway Protection Force jawans arrived and Monojit was taken to hospital, where he was declared dead on arrival.”
Monojit’s family and friends gathered at the Baranagar State General Hospital, where his body lay.
Monojit’s father Sujit Ram Yadav runs a small cattle pen and supplies dairy products, a relative said. The family lives in a two-storey houseon S.C. Banerjee Road in Baranagar.
Monojit, the second of three sons, was “good at his studies and obedient, and rarely got into fights”, a relative said. He usually took the Metro from Shyambazar on his way back from school, the relative added.
A friend of the victim told this newspaper outside the hospital that he had received a call from a schoolmate who was returning with Monojit.
“He said Monojit was severely injured. I rushed to the Metro station with another friend on a bike,” he said. “Monojit was bleeding heavily; his shirt was soaked in blood.”
A doctor at the hospital said Monojit had been stabbed in the chest below the left shoulder.
A senior officer from the Barrackpore Commissionerate said: “We are scrutinising CCTV footage to ascertain the chain of events.”
Several passengers expressed dismay that a student had been able to carry a weapon into a Metro station.
The concourse level, where the ticket counters are, has no metal detectors at any Metro station.
A passenger encounters a walk-through metal detector and a baggage scanner only while entering the platform from the concourse area.
“It’s not possible to conduct (metal detector) checks in the non-ticketing (concourse) area,” a Metro official said.
Train services were not affected, the official said.
A large team from Dakshineswar police station, under the Barrackpore Commissionerate, secured the crime scene and collectedevidence.