1) Debdas Mookerjea (in T-shirt) and wife Sumitra flanked by a police officer and a relative at their Salt Lake home on Wednesday afternoon. 2) The Mookerjeas’ two-storey house in AH Block. 3) An officer inspects the broken latch of the collapsible gate at the entrance to the house. 4) The broken pane of the glass door through which the robbers turned the knob and went in early on Wednesday. Pictures by Anindya Shankar Ray

A possible rerun of the Bidhan Nivas tragedy was barely averted in Salt Lake early on Wednesday when a constantly ringing cellphone scared away armed robbers trying to gag a 65-year-old woman after locking up her husband in another room.

Retired civil engineer Debdas Mookerjea, 72, had woken up around 3.45am to the sound of footsteps in a room adjacent to his on the first floor of his two-storey residence at AH-239, less than a kilometre from the housing estate where 93-year-old Shanta Bhattacharya was fatally gagged last week.

He jumped out of bed to check who it was, only to find the door locked from outside. Wife Sumitra, sleeping in the adjacent room, was then pleading with three masked men armed with a gun and a knife not to gag her. She had been woken up seconds ago by the glare of a torchlight on her face and dragged out of the mosquito net.

“They tied my hands and were trying to gag me. I requested them not to tape my mouth, saying I was suffering from respiratory distress. One of the men slapped me for having said that. Fortunately, an accomplice asked him to spare me the ordeal and he listened,” recounted Sumitra, a hand on the collapsible gate that the robbers had prised open with a rod.

The twin-panelled glass door beyond the gate bore a shattered pane through which the robbers turned the knob to go in.

Between 3.50 and 4am, the trio ransacked the entire first floor, barring the room in which they had locked up Debdas. The robbers, however, found little to take away except the gold bangles Sumitra was wearing and her cellphone.

“They asked me for the key to the vault. I said all the keys were in an almirah on the ground floor. At this, one of the men hit me on the shoulder with an iron rod and dragged me to the ground floor,” Sumitra recalled.

Just as Sumitra was leading the gang member to the almirah, her cellphone rang. It was Debdas.

“I knew something was seriously wrong and thought that ringing my wife’s cellphone was the only way to know what was going on. The call went unanswered, though I could hear the phone ringing on the ground floor. I redialled but someone disconnected the call,” said Debdas, an arm around his wife, seated next to him on the sofa.

Debdas called Sumitra’s phone a third time. This time, the robbers panicked.

“They had opened the vault, but hadn’t put anything in their bag when my cellphone rang. Suddenly, all three seemed to be shaky. I heard one of them say that they should pack up. They held the knife and pistol to my back and asked me to open the door so that they could make a quick exit. I suppose they feared there were people waiting outside our gate,” Sumitra said.

The robbers even untied her so that she could open the gate and hid behind her. Once the gate opened, they pushed her inside and ran through an adjacent patch of green towards the Kestopur canal.

Once the robbers were out of sight, Sumitra ran upstairs and unlocked the door to Debdas’s room. The retired engineer enquired from his wife whether she was okay before dialling Bidhannagar East police station.

Helpline 100 was also on Debdas’s mind, but he had heard and read enough about its fickleness over the past few weeks to waste time dialling D for Distress.

“I did not want to take a chance. So I called the police station directly and the cops were prompt in their response. A patrol jeep was outside our house in 15 minutes,” Debdas said.

The elderly Mookerjeas have been living in AH-239 for three decades, the last six years by themselves. Son Chandan is employed with a chartered accountancy firm in Hyderabad and daughter Jashomati, a software developer, is based in Paris.

Theirs could be the story of any other elderly couple in the city with children settled elsewhere. At Bidhan Nivas, three women — victim Shanta, daughter-in-law Subhalakshmi Bhattacharya and help Bina Ganguly — lived by themselves in the flat where the daylight robbery occurred last Wednesday. The security supervisor of the housing estate allegedly masterminded the robbery.

Champak Bhattacharya, the superintendent of police of North 24-Parganas, said the trio involved in the Salt Lake break-in were probably amateurs.

“Otherwise, they wouldn’t have panicked on hearing a cellphone ring. They were aged around 25 to 30 years and conversed in Bengali. We have found fingerprints and are looking for them.”