The window (circled in red) of the apartment where Aloke Kumar and Suchitra Roy were murdered. (Tamaghna Banerjee)

Aloke Kumar Roy and Suchitra Roy

A brother and sister trying to stop a bar-cum-restaurant in their building from setting up a second pub on the floor below theirs were found clubbed to death in their apartment on Thursday afternoon.

The bodies of Aloke Kumar Roy, 65, a retired engineer of Garden Reach Shipbuilders, and his spinster sister Suchitra Roy, 61, were found lying on the floor of their second-floor apartment at Metropolitan Township, off the EM Bypass, with the back of their heads smashed by a heavy object.

Police haven’t named anyone as a suspect but the focus of the investigation so far has been the “dispute” between the victims and the management of pub chain Spice Garden. Aloke and Suchitra were the sole occupants of the second floor of the four-storey building, which houses the Spice Garden Bar and Restaurant on the ground floor.

The siblings — Aloke was married but lived with his sister — had lodged several complaints against Spice Garden with Tiljala police station over the past couple of years, the reasons ranging from noisy pub nights to alleged threats from the management.

“The Roys were the original owners of the plot on which the building stands. The realtor who developed the property allegedly violated his agreement with the siblings and sold the ground and first floors to the owner of Spice Garden. While the Roys couldn’t do anything about it, they were trying to stall plans to set up a pub on the first floor as well,” an officer said.

Family friend Nandita Bose, who lives a few blocks away, said Suchitra had told her a few days ago that she feared the bar management would resort to arm-twisting to have their way. “The siblings had refused to give a no-objection letter for the proposed first-floor pub. The local councillor had backed them but we could make out that Suchitra and her brother were under a lot of pressure,” she said.

Spice Garden is owned by Saranjit Singh, who has expanded his business to Burdwan, Haldia and Siliguri since opening his first outlet in the late nineties. The Spice Garden bar and restaurant on VIP Road, near Kaikhali, is one of the seven watering holes that Singh owns in the city.

Singh was unavailable for comment on the allegations against him.

The police said the Roy siblings were murdered between 11am and 2pm. Their bodies were found by employees of C2K Communication, a cellphone repair company with its office on the top floor of the building, around 2.45pm.

“Painters hired by the Roys were at work on the staircase through the morning and had spotted both the victims between 9.30 and 10.30am. One of the painters noticed in the afternoon that the main door was bolted from outside and alerted the C2K staff, who entered the flat to find the two bodies,” an officer said.

While Aloke was found sprawled on the floor in the living room, his sister’s body was in the adjacent bedroom of the 1,700sq ft apartment.

“It seems more than one person was involved in the murder. Nothing has been found missing from the apartment, going by what the siblings’ friends have told us. Fingerprint experts may be able to help us make a breakthrough in the case,” the additional superintendent of police (industrial) of South 24-Parganas, Murli Dhar, said.

Since his retirement, Aloke had been running a phone booth in Beleghata. His sister owned an adjoining desktop printing unit. The duo had rented out a part of the top floor to C2K Communication and were planning to keep paying guests in the other flat, friends said.

Aloke’s wife Gopa lives in Asansol and son Jeet, an MBA student, stays as a paying guest near his institute in Sonarpur on the southern fringes. Neither had arrived at the apartment till late on Thursday.

An officer at Tiljala police station said Aloke and Suchitra had a brother based in Switzerland.

“We are trying to confirm whether he also has a stake in the Metropolitan Township property.”