Avik Mukherjee, the Netaji Nagar-based realtor who was allegedly lynched on Thursday night, had repeatedly pleaded with the mob to hear him out before tying him to a lamp post and beating him up, police have learnt following three arrests on Saturday.
Among the three arrested is a woman who had joined the youths to beat up Mukherjee leading to his death. The three have been booked in a murder case and officers sad they were on the look out for at least two others for their alleged involvement in the crime.
Mukherjee , 35, had gone to Baruipur on the southern fringes of the city on a joyride with a woman on Thursday night. A mob stopped him at Begumpur gram panchayat believing him to be a cattle lifter and lynched him.
The woman told the police on Friday that Mukherjee had stopped to relieve himself in a corner of a paddy field when some villagers spotted him.
“The woman said she took shelter in the house of a woman but since the deceased had his two-wheeler parked at one side of the road, he couldn’t run away and the group of villagers managed to get hold of him,” said a senior officer of Baruipur police station.
Officers probing the case said a preliminary post-mortem report revealed that Mukherjee suffered severe injuries including on his head that possibly caused his death.
The police have learnt some of the people who had allegedly beaten up Mukherjee were armed with bamboo and iron rods.
One of the villagers, Asit Sarkar, has told cops that while it was true that incidents of cattle lifting were on the rise in the area for sometime now, Mukherjee did not appear to be a cattle lifter. But the mob was convinced that he was one. The youths refused to pay heed to appeals from a section of villagers who turned up at the spot on Thursday night and asked them to stop beating Mukherjee.
Investigators have learnt that Mukherjee tried reasoning with the mob that a thief wouldn’t come to steal riding a new two-wheeler and had said that he was a realtor. Mukherjee’s pleas apparently fell on deaf ears. The few who had come to rescue him were asked to stay away, investigators said.
