The Derozio Mission High School that Asit Bhanja (above) ran in Belghoria. (Bishwarup Dutta)

Calcutta, May 30: The wife and two children of a school owner were found dead in their Belghoria home this morning, and hours later the man who ran Derozio Mission High School was found lifeless by rail tracks.

A domestic help found 35-year-old Gayatri Bhanja and her children — eight-year-old son Pritam and four-year-old daughter Priya — lying lifeless in their Jatin Das Nagar house, part of which houses the eight-year-old Madhyamik school that Asit Bhanja owned.

The door was ajar and Asit, 42, was missing.

But later this morning, police found a man’s body near the Belghoria station tracks. Residents of Jatin Das Nagar, on the northern fringes of the city, identified him as Asit in RG Kar Medical College where the body had been taken.

The police suspect that Asit was deep in debt and killed his family first before committing suicide. “Based on a complaint lodged by Gayatri’s father, we have started a murder case. The bodies have been sent for post-mortem. It appears that the family was deep in debt. There could be other reasons as well,” said a senior officer of Belghoria police station.

“It could be that Asit had used a rope to strangle his wife and then throttled the children using his hands.”

Neighbours said that on Friday night, the family celebrated Jamai Sashthi when Gayatri’s sister and parents came to their first-floor home.

Neighbours said Asit had bought more than one car in the last few years though he could not afford it. “He would take a loan from a bank to buy a car, then default. The bank would confiscate the vehicle. He would again get another car,” said neighbour Prosenjit De.

Utpal Kumar Ghosh, the principal of Derozio Mission High School, said there was some tension between Asit and Gayatri because the son was mentally challenged and the daughter had some problem in her leg.

He said Asit would ask for money from parents of students to run the institution, which, Ghosh claimed, earned Rs 2 lakh annually.

Asit hailed from Midnapore town. When he came to Calcutta for his graduation, he took a room on rent at Gayatri’s house in Jatin Das Nagar. The two fell in love and married. In 2001, he started the school.

Neighbours said of late, Asit had kept to himself and would not mix much with people in the locality.

Monindra Mondal, a carpenter who had worked in the school, said Asit owed him over Rs 1 lakh. “I had been asking for the money but he was putting it off on some excuse or the other.”

Bapi Ghosh, a resident of the area whose child goes to Derozio Mission High School, said: “He (Asit) was a decent person and we had good relations with him, but he would always ask for money.”

A Jatin Das Nagar resident who runs a grocery store in the area said Asit was “extravagant” and would “buy goods worth hundreds, sometimes over thousands of rupees”.