Calcutta, July 6: Six buses, two fire engines and 15 shops were torched by a mob in Howrah this evening to protest a police baton-charge after a bus that crushed a schoolgirl was set on fire.

Ria Das, 13, was making her way through minibuses parked in an “illegal” terminus at Domjur bazaar when she was run over by a mini that was trying to squeeze into a narrow space.

The Class VII student was on her way home from St Thomas School, Dasnagar.
“This accident was waiting to happen. There is no proper bus stand. The land earmarked for the stand has been illegally occupied by shopkeepers and so the Domjur-Howrah minis park bang in the middle of the road opposite the police station,” said Manoj Ghosh, who lives nearby.

The assault on protesters added fuel to fire. “The police did not step out of the station when we were trying to reach the girl to hospital. But when some people set the killer bus on fire, they rushed out and beat up innocent people,” said Bapi Thakur.

The mob swelled as hundreds of residents from Uttar Jhaparda, the locality where Ria lived, arrived at the spot around 4.30pm.

Seeing the large gathering, the police went back into the station, clearing the way for the mayhem that followed over the next two-and-a-half hours. The mob set fire to five minibuses on the Howrah-Domjur route and a private bus. The fire engines that came were not spared. The shops on the plot meant for the bus stand were torched.

The leaping flames snapped the overhead wires and plunged the area into darkness.
Around 7pm, a large team led by the district police chief arrived with RAF jawans and resorted to a lathicharge again and lobbed tear-gas shells to disperse the mob.

Two days ago, Howrah’s traffic mess came into focus when a minibus racing another fell 35ft off a flyover on train tracks, killing a dozen people. Today’s trouble took place about 15km away.

Ria’s father Tarun Das, who used to work for a jeweller in Mumbai, had returned home with his family only eight months ago and set up a shop. Ria was his only child.
Howrah police chief N.K. Singh was not available for comment. A Domjur officer said:

“We have arrested 15 people in connection with the road rage. Raids are on to nab the rest.”

He had no clue where the killer driver could be.