A 70-year-old resident of Mansai in Tufanganj-II block of Cooch Behar district died in a road accident on Saturday.

Sources said Pijush Sarkar’s daughter-in-law delivered a baby boy a few days back at the Tufanganj subdivisional hospital. On Saturday, he went to the hospital to see the mother and the newborn.

While he was returning home by riding a motorcycle, the two-wheeler collided head-on with a heavy vehicle bound for Cooch Behar at the Haripur-Karitala area around noon. The heavy vehicle mowed him down.

Sarkar died on the spot.

A team from the Boxirhat police station and the firemen went to the spot. The body was recovered and sent for post-mortem.

The driver of the vehicle, suspected to be a container truck, fled the spot. The police are checking out CCTV footage of the area to identify the vehicle and trace the driver, sources said.

Man abducted

A 51-year-old man, allegedly abducted from a spot near Netaji Bhavan Metro station in Bhowanipore on Wednesday, was rescued from an apartment in Jadavpur on Friday.

Timir Kanti Majumder, a resident of Kulpi in South 24-Parganas, was waiting to meet a client near the Metro station when a group allegedly whisked him away in a vehicle.

Police arrested five persons in this connection and registered a case against them at Bhowanipore police station.

His wife, Tapasi lodged a police complaint on Friday alleging that her husband had been abducted. She did not have any clue about the abduction till she started receiving ransom calls for his release. They demanded ₹5 lakh ransom, the cops said.

Majumder used to arrange loans from banks and helped applicants with the necessary documents required to apply for a loan.

“On May 28, he came to Bhowanipore for some work and was talking to one of his clients when he was abducted,” a police officer said.

During investigation, it appeared that Tapasi had paid ₹10,000 to an unknown
UPI number.

The wife said she was scared after receiving the ransom calls and had paid the amount to buy time for arranging the entire amount.

“The mobile phone linked to the UPI was identified and a team began to track it,” the police said. The mobile number was traced to Sukanta Setu near Jadavpur and the person using it he was detained.

During interrogation, it emerged that this person and his associates stay in an apartment on the 11th floor of a building on Raja SC Mallick Road in Jadavpur.

A team reached the address and rescued Majumder.