A former Jadavpur University student, arrested on Wednesday, orchestrated the campus attack on education minister Bratya Basu from Spain, police told the Alipore court on Friday.
Hindol Majumdar, a former pharmaceutical technology student currently pursuing a PhD in biomedicine at Universidad de Granada, Spain, was remanded in police custody until August 18.
He was detained at the Delhi airport on August 13, en route to Calcutta after meeting his sister, based on a lookout notice issued earlier.
Public prosecutor Sourin Ghoshal, opposing Hindol’s bail plea, said he masterminded the attack from abroad. “Aftab Ansari was not present during the American Center attack in Calcutta in 2002, but plotted it from Dubai,” he said.
“Hindol prepared the blueprint of the attack over WhatsApp with a section of university students,” Ghoshal added.
The police said they had recovered WhatsApp chats from Hindol’s phone. “We will try to find out why he instigated some of the students against minister Basu,” a senior
officer.
His father, Chandan Majumdar, a retired JU professor, questioned his son’s arrest. “No summons reached our home. Why was a lookout notice issued? JU students aren’t so immature that they’d act on someone’s words from abroad.”
Hindol was associated with the Democratic Students’ Front (DSF), which ran the students’ union in JU’s engineering and technology faculty.
On March 1, a group of ultra-Left students detained Basu for hours during his visit to JU for a pro-Trinamool teachers’ association meeting. The minister was allegedly heckled by students demanding the immediate resumption of campus elections.