Silchar, Sept. 13: Katigorah police in Cachar district are looking for the main accused who caught a Gangetic dolphin, a state aquatic animal, recently from Barak river at Harinagar in Cachar near the Indo-Bangladesh border.

Police sources said Sukhendu Das was accused of selling the dolphin's meat in the market. A hunt for Das, who is absconding, was on, sources added.

Mustafa Ali Ahmed, assistant conservator of forest, Karimganj, today told The Telegraph that a probe had been ordered into the alleged killing of the dolphin and selling its meat in a Harinagar market in Katigorah. "We came to know about it a few days ago that a dolphin was caught from the Barak river; it was slaughtered and its meat sold. I visited the spot the day before yesterday and filed a case at Katigorah police station," Ahmed added.

Asked about the status of the investigation, he said: "From our preliminary investigation, we have come to know that a fisherman caught the dolphin, weighing around 15-20kg, from the Barak river and then sold it to Das. Both the buyer and seller were ignorant of the importance of dolphin and they considered it a normal fish."

The incident hogged the limelight after Jahangir Alom Laskar, Kalain block Youth Congress president, posted a photograph with the dolphin on Facebook a few days ago. Ahmed said the forest officials, along with the police, had questioned Jahangir and his friends Taz Uddin Barbhuiya, Giyas Uddin and Salim Uddin, about the dolphin with which they posed in the photo.

Jahangir denied the allegation of being involved in the killing of the dolphin and added that he had just posed in the photograph and was not aware of anything else.

A higher forest official today said none of them was aware of the consequences of killing a dolphin, an endangered species in the coun-try. Poachers kill dolphins for its body oil, an ingredient for the production of medicines. It fetches high prices.

A survey by Aaranyak, a wildlife NGO, in 2012, put the population of river dolphins in Assam at 635.