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South Calcutta’s posh Ballygunge neighbourhood woke up to a street shooting on Sunday morning with an alleged night club brawl culminating in motorbike-borne men firing at two youths from the rival group, leaving the duo injured and morning walkers ducking for cover.
The incident occurred close to Azad Hind dhaba on Ballygunge Circular Road around 6am, minutes after leather dealer Shaqueel Khan, 28, and DJ Vishal Agarwal, 27, had stepped out of New Sharma Hotel — around 100 metres away — to find a cigarette shop while seven other friends waited at the restaurant for breakfast to be served.
Shaqueel was on ventilator support at Apollo Hospitals till late on Sunday with bullet wounds in his abdomen and jaw. Friend Vishal Agarwal suffered a leg injury but was discharged from hospital in the evening.
Witnesses, most of them residents starting their day with a walk or a jog, told police that two assailants came on a motorbike from the AJC Bose Road side and opened fire on the duo from point-blank range before the two-wheeler did a U-turn and sped away.
DJ Ajay Jaiswal, who works along with Vishal in the Salt Lake watering hole Caught ’n’ Bowled and witnessed the shooting, told Metro that his colleague and Shaqueel were attacked for siding with a common friend named Babar Khan during an altercation at the Hazra night club Ginger around four hours earlier.
“Me and three of my colleagues (the other two are Nadeem Khan and Hemant Gupta) had gone to Ginger after work to join our friends, only to be sucked into this altercation between Babar and this person whom we only know as Vicky. Everything seemed to have been sorted out after someone from the club called the police, but Vicky and his gang obviously had other ideas,” he said.
Ajay and his friends would often visit Ballygunge Circular Road for breakfast after a night out, which the assailants were probably aware of.
“I was sitting in one of the two Santro cars of our group when the incident occurred. All of us were hungry and had ordered roti, tadka and chicken bharta. Shaqueel and Vishal, followed by their girlfriends, were walking towards Azad Hind dhaba while the food was being prepared. I saw two men accost my friends and one of them took out a gun and started firing,” he recalled.
Ajay and the rest of the group rushed their injured friends to Chittaranjan Hospital, from where they were shifted to Apollo later. “We have not been able to speak to him as he is in the ICU. His doctors have told us that they are trying their best to save him,” said Shaqueel’s uncle Mohammed Wasim Khan, a resident of Beckbagan.
Vishal’s brother-in-law Suraj Agarwal said the only thing that the Burrabazar family knew was that a brawl took place between one of his friends and the accused hours before the shooting.
A spokesperson for Ginger, however, denied that any such brawl took place on the premises. “There was no trouble, nothing that concerned the guests or staff of Ginger,” he claimed.
Lallan Sharma, the owner of New Sharma Hotel, also denied that the victims had come to the restaurant for breakfast. “I open my dhaba at 7am. It is completely baseless that they had come to our dhaba. I heard about the incident at 8am from other shop owners,” he said.
Ballygunge Circular Road is lined with eateries, the landmark being Azad Hind dhaba, made famous by painter M.F. Husain who would drop by for tea and had even gifted the eatery a small work of his.
But this stretch has now attained notoriety because of the crowds the dhabas attract.
Eye witness speaks out
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Muzammil Khan, a 45-year-old guard at the office of the Automobile Association of Eastern India at 13 Ballygunge Circular Road, was waiting to be relieved of duty after a nine-hour shift when gunshots and screams for help a few hundred feet away sent him scurrying out of his post. He tells Metro what he saw
It was around 5.55am. I had just had a bath and was waiting for my colleague Narender Singh to arrive when I heard the first of three gunshots that I initially mistook for sounds made by the exhaust pipe of a motorbike. I sensed something was wrong only when I heard someone screaming for help seconds later. I thought to myself, “No, this can’t be a motorbike.” I ran out of my post towards the gate of the fuel pump on our premises and saw two youths lying on the road. One of them was bleeding from the head. I ran back to the post thinking that the people who had fired the shots were still around. In any case, we are under strict instructions not to leave our post or open the gate if any incident occurs outside the premises.
I was wondering what to do when I heard more screams; this time it was a girl’s voice. I craned my neck and saw a white Santro screeching to a halt in front of the fuel pump, and a few boys and girls lifting the bleeding youths into the car. Some morning walkers and employees of the nearby Azad Hind dhaba had gathered at the spot by then. I took a few tentative steps towards the gate again and saw the Santro speed away towards AJC Bose Road. I was relieved in more ways than one when Narender arrived a few minutes later.
