Dec. 18: A gang allegedly assaulted three Hidco officials yesterday afternoon when they went to stop an illegal construction on a New Town plot owned by the government agency.

Three men were arrested today for the alleged assault. Police said the accused - Ramesh Chandra Dey, 36, Kayum Ali, 38, and Rustam Ali, 31 - were members of a committee of land losers in New Town. They now live in and around Hatiara, on the outskirts of the township.

The gang had allegedly been overseeing the construction of an illegal house on a two-and-a-half cottah plot owned by Hidco, the implementing agency of New Town, over the past couple of days.

"The men removed a board which stated that the plot was a government property and replaced it with another, which read 'Site for Indosun Foundation and Land Owner'," a Hidco official said.

Indosun Foundation, the police said, is an organisation supporting landlosers of New Town. None of the office bearers of the organisation could be traced.

"The men had employed around a dozen labourers and erected nine pillars in a horizontal formation. Holes had been dug for installing more pillars," the Hidco official said.

The agency sent a team to the Action Area II plot yesterday afternoon after learning about the illegal construction.

When the Hidco officials asked the labourers to stop construction, Ramesh, Kayum and Rustam allegedly abused them and pushed them to the ground before raining blows on them. The gang also prevented the officials from leaving the spot.

"One of the officials managed to call the police. The assaulters fled on their bikes on seeing a police jeep approaching the spot," a Hidco source said.

The cop escorted the team to Hidco Bhavan in Action Area I of the Rajarhat township. Later in the day, the team filed a complaint with New Town police station.

The gang and the labourers stayed away from the plot today.

A member of the Hidco team that visited the plot said that at one point of time he felt he and his colleagues would not be able to leave the place alive.

"We had just reached the spot and asked them to stop work when they started hitting us. I feared the assault would leave us dead," the official said on Sunday.

Another Hidco official said Indosun Foundation had challenged the acquisition of the Action Area II plot in the high court.