June 30: A man who entered the Subhas Sarovar premises with three men and a woman yesterday afternoon was found dead sometime later, police said.

Two of the men, whom the cops have detained, apparently told them that Ashish Sardar was shot dead with an improvised 9mm gun when he refused to get intimate with the woman for the scene to be recorded on a cellphone camera.

A guard on the Sarovar premises, where hundreds gather in the morning and evening, spotted Sardar, 30, bleeding from the neck around 2pm and alerted the police. He appeared unconscious, seated on a bench facing the lake.

He was declared dead at NRS hospital. The post-mortem suggested a bullet pierced his neck and got lodged in the spinal cord, killing him instantly.

Sardar, who lived in Pagladanga near Tangra, was unemployed, the police said. He had left home last morning with some of his friends. A couple of hours later his family got to know he had died.

"The man was identified through his phone that was in his pocket. We have detained two of his friends whose names emerged during investigation," Vishal Garg, additional commissioner, said.

Sardar's family had named the two as those who came to pick him up from home.

Cops got to know during investigation that Sardar and the others had entered the Sarovar premises around 1.30pm.

The detained men claimed in their statement the third, who is still at large, had asked Sardar to get intimate with the woman so that he could record it on his phone, the police said.

"Initially, when he was told to sit next to her, he did so. But when he was asked to embrace and kiss her he refused and a fight followed," an officer said. "The argument apparently ended with a gunshot."

The police haven't arrested the woman.