Sushanta supervised burial of Trinamul bodies: CID

Two of the Majhi brothers stand in the courtyard of their house in Keshpur’s Piashala, where the Trinamul supporters were massacred in 2007. (Samir Mondal)

Calcutta, Aug. 12: Sushanta Ghosh had “supervised” the burying of the bodies of five Trinamul Congress activists murdered by alleged CPM cadres and had also instructed villagers not to go towards the site in Garbeta, the CID said today.

“We have a number of witnesses who will corroborate this fact. They will tell the court how Ghosh had supervised the work of burying the bodies,” a CID officer said.

The CID probe has revealed that seven Trinamul supporters were chased by around 40 CPM activists on September 22, 2002, and murdered in the courtyard of Gobinda Majhi, a resident of Keshpur’s Piashala village.

“Three teams of CPM cadres were then formed to take away the bodies. One team buried two bodies in a nearby field. Another group carried the remaining five bodies on a bullock cart to a wetland in Benachapra (a neighbouring village) while the third team buried them there,” the officer said.

“Ghosh was present when the bodies were being buried in Benachapra. We came to know about this while interrogating Ajay Das and a few others who had dug up the earth,” the officer added. “Curiously, a few days after this, the local administration accepted the villagers’ long-standing demand of building a mud wall around the wetland. We suspect this was done so that no one could approach the area where the bodies had been buried,” the officer said.

Ghosh, the CPM’s Garbeta MLA, has denied these claims, CID sources said. They said he was “calm” during today’s interrogation. Ghosh is being interrogated by a team of 10 officers at Bhawani Bhavan, where he was brought last night after a Midnapore court remanded him in seven days’ police custody.

“When we asked him where he was on September 22, 2002, he said he could not remember. When we asked Ghosh to give the names of those who murdered the Trinamul supporters, he denied any knowledge of the incident,” another CID officer said.

CID director-general (crime) V.V. Thambi said: “We are not going to rush. He is there with us for seven days. We will also try to find out if Ghosh was involved in any other killings during the political turmoil in Keshpur and Garbeta between 1998 and 2002.”

“We may take Ghosh to the site of the murder and the burial spot,” Thambi added.

The CID sources said Ghosh, the former paschimanchal development minister, was not asked too many questions today related to the killings. “Today was the first day of interrogation. We mainly asked him questions related to his political career and rise in the party. He told us that he became an MLA for the first time in 1985 from Garbeta and that he was the youngest MLA in Bengal that year,” an officer said.

CID officers said it would be probed if any other CPM leader was involved in the 2002 killings.