March 21: A man arrested on Sunday in connection with the murder of an executive in Odisha's Paradip is suspected to have been involved in three murders in Bengal.

Kader Khan, 37, alias Ashok Bihari, was picked up from Howrah's Malipanchghora for his alleged role in the murder of Mahendra Swain, the general manager of Hyderabad-based Seaways Shipping and Logistics Limited.

Police said the resident of Pilkhana in Howrah, whose arrest followed an alert from Odisha police, had at least five other guises and was part of an inter-state gang of hired killers.

"The gang is active in Bengal, Jharkhand and Odisha," an officer said.

Swain was shot dead in broad daylight in Paradip on October 26. Officers in Odisha police said Khan, who had got Rs 10 lakh for the murder, outsourced the job to "juniors".

Khan was the 11th accused in the case to have been arrested. The alleged masterminds had been rounded up from Thailand.

"The total deal was of Rs 50 lakh. Khan has claimed to have got Rs 10 lakh, of which he had given a part to the person who shot the victim," the superintendent of police in Odisha's Jagatsinghpur district, J.N. Pankaj, told Metro.

A senior police officer who was posted in Howrah when Khan was "active" there described the accused as a "slippery character".

"He would execute a project and vanish without trace. He would switch identities and change cities so frequently that it would become impossible to track him down," the officer said.

In Rourkela he was "Raju", while in Balasore people knew him as "Suleman".

"Khan had lived in Odisha for a couple of years and has good contacts there. When his gang was hired for the murder, he activated his boys in Calcutta and helped them with logistics in Odisha," Pankaj said.

"Initially, our attempts to catch him failed. Then we sought the Howrah City Police's help."

Last month, Odisha police had arrested Mohammad Babul from Kidderpore in Calcutta. He was part of the same gang and had allegedly shot the executive dead.

Police sources said Khan had admitted to his involvement in at least three murder cases in Bengal.

Two of the murders were reported from Pilkhana and Sankrail in Howrah in 2005 and 2002, respectively. The third was reported from Lalbagh in Murshidabad in 2005.