The Telegraph report published on June 29

Calcutta, June 30: A faulty description of the colour of bank manager Sunit Sinha’s clothes in the police’s official records had prevented his relatives from identifying him from a photograph on June 18.

When an officer at the Calcutta police headquarters showed the photograph of Sunit to his brother, he could not recognise the bloated body. The written note with it mentioned black trousers and a red-and-white shirt.

Sukhendu ruled out the photograph being that of his brother. Sunit was in a grey trouser and pink-white chequered shirt when his wife Aparna had last seen him on the afternoon of June 1, boarding a Dalhousie-bound bus after picking up Class XI admission forms for his son.

“The photograph was beyond recognition. The shirt’s colour was not clear. We enquired with the officers of the missing person squad at Lalbazar about the colour of the trousers. They said it was black. It couldn’t be my brother’s,” Sukhendu said.

Joint commissioner of police (crime) Pallab Kanti Ghosh admitted to Metro on Friday the possibility of a cop committing a mistake while noting down details of the body found on the banks of the Hooghly on June 3. “The body had been in muddy waters for several hours and the colour of the victim’s trousers had appeared dark. That is why a police officer possibly described the deceased’s trousers as black,” said Ghosh.

Underlying the statement is the admission of the insouciance in a section of the police, highlighted in The Telegraph report (left) on Saturday.

The Sinhas were shown Sunit’s phone on June 26 and, the next day, a photograph was handed to them at North Port. This photograph was clear. But by then the morgue had sent the body for cremation because it was “unclaimed”.

“The photograph we were shown on Wednesday (June 27) was much clearer. He was wearing the same white and pink check shirt he had left home in on June 1. I also saw the ring that he wore on his right hand,” Aparna said.

She reached the crematorium only to be told that her husband had already been reduced to ashes, “unidentified and unclaimed”. “I wanted to see my husband’s body. It is my right. I did not demand anything irrational,” Aparna said on Friday, tears trickling down.

A senior police officer admitted that it would have been easy to locate Sunit had his phone been found but “the dom who had retrieved the body from the riverbank had kept the phone with himself”.

Since June 5, the Sinhas had alerted the police several times that his phone was ringing but the police had not been able to trace it. Asked about the delay, a detective department officer said: “It was because the SIM was issued in Patna, outside the jurisdiction of West Bengal circle. We had to contact the service provider with the help of Patna police and wait for their feedback.”

Sunit was in charge of Punjab and Sind Bank’s Central School branch in Patna.

An executive working with a cellphone service provider said “it should not take more than a few hours for the service provider to respond”.

Calcutta police traced the phone to the dom 23 days after it had been found.