The six accused in Siliguri police station on Wednesday. Picture by Kundan Yolmo

Siliguri, May 28: Six persons, three of them engineering students, were arrested last night for the abduction and murder of call centre employee Abhishek Chachan on May 22.

One of the accused, Surojit Das, is a former boyfriend of the girl Abhishek had been seeing for some time.

The manner in which Abhishek’s body had been dumped has shocked police. Two of the accused Roman Sarkar and Shahidur Rehman had sat with the body in between them on a motorcycle and ridden out of town.

Roman, Shahidur and Ananda Gupta are students of a private engineering college in Salbari and used to stay in a rented flat in Hatimore, where Abhishek was killed. The Chachans, residents of Deshbandhupara, lodged a complaint suspecting abduction after he went missing. The body of the Siliguri College of Commerce student was recovered from Liucipokhri, 20km from here, on May 24.

“Surojit Das, a medicine shop employee, wanted to teach Abhishek a lesson. In the past two months, Abhishek had become close to a girl who once had an affair with Surojit,” said Rahul Srivastava, the superintendent of police of Darjeeling.

The police said Surojit had made enquires about Abhishek and had found out that he was eager to acquire a particular model of motorcycle and used it as a bait to bring him to the flat in Hatimore in the evening. Surojit had befriended the students at a Christmas party at Sevoke Road last year.

At Hatimore, the boys had beer together, but laced Abhishek’s drink with sleeping pills. What followed was a heated exchange between Surojit and Abhishek. The group then left Abhishek gagged and tied in the flat. He was unconscious by then

When they arrived around 7pm to release the youth, they found him dead, the district police chief said.

Surojit tried to hush up the incident by cooking up an abduction story.

“The body was inside the flat on the night of May 22 and for the whole of the next day. During this time Surojit kept making ransom calls to Abhishek’s family with the help of Amit Mondal, who used to work with him in the same medicine shop,” said Srivastava.

On the night of May 23, Roman and Shahidur, whose father is a police constable in Malda, carried the body on a motorcycle to Liucipokhri, a distance of 20km. They were accompanied by Nilkamal Sharma, another of Surojit’s friends, on another motorcycle.

“Roman was driving the bike while Shahidur was on the pillion. The body was in a sitting position between them. Their guts have shocked me,” the police chief said. The police said the boys had avoided the main road.

Srivastava said the police first detected Surojit’s name when they checked the call details on Abhishek’s mobile. “An interrogation revealed that he and Abhishek had a heated exchange over the mobile phone around 11pm on May 21and the next morning,” he said.

Abhishek’s body was recovered from Liucipokhri on May 24. A preliminary post-mortem has revealed that he had been given a high dose of sleeping pills, the effect of which, combined with the way he was gagged, led to his suffocating and ultimately death.

Abhishek’s father Arvind Chachan said he was “satisfaction” with the police investigation. The accused have been remanded in police custody for five days.