CID to ask court for more time to quiz ex-ministe
Supporters of Anna Hazare during their token hungerstrike, at Metro Channel on Tuesday.
The criminal investigation department (CID) is going to appeal to the Midnapore court on Wednesday to grant it more time to interrogate CPI(M) strongman and MLA Sushanta Ghosh in the skeleton recovery case as he managed to remain at the SSKM Hospital for the fourth consecutive night on Tuesday.
Although he was all set to be released on Tuesday afternoon after undergoing an angiography, a drama unfurled and continued till night over the mode of ferrying the MLA from the hospital to the CID headquarters at Bhawani Bhavan. The doctors suggested the agency to take him on a stretcher after signing his release bond. But the CID refused.
The hospital authorities and CID officers held a meeting till 9 pm at the hospital on his health condition. Later CID’s DIG (operations) K. Jayaraman informed that the former state minister would be released at 9 pm on Wednesday and will be taken for production before the chief judicial magistrate of Midnapore court, Manoj Rai for hearing.
Earlier at around 12 pm, Mr Ghosh underwent an angiography on the doctors’ advice and was shifted to a cabin in the cardiology department from the ICCU where he had spent almost four days out of his seven-day police remand, complaining of illness since Saturday late night. But no sign of any ailment was found in a series of medical tests and observation by a four-member medical board.
“Nothing serious was detected in the angiography. So the medical board concluded that there is no need of keeping him at the hospital anymore and decided to release him,” said director of the institute of post graduate medical education and research of the hospital Pradip Kumar Mitra. But his stay at the hospital affected the probe as he was not available for interrogation, official sources said.
Meanwhile, the CID will produce some clinching evidence about his presence at his Chandrakona Road house in West Midnapore on September 22, 2002, when seven Trinamul Congress activists were massacred, to substantiate its prayer of extending his police custody.
During interrogation, Mr Ghosh has so far claimed that he was in Kolkata for his father’s treatment on that day. The state detective agency is also keeping an option of making a plea to the court of conducting a polygraph test on him citing his lack of co-operation in the probe. Official sources revealed that he had even threatened senior CID officers including director general of police (CID) V.V. Thambi for their marathon interrogation in the first 48 hours of his police custody. He warned them that he would take them on “once the power in the government changes.”
Mr Ghosh told his interrogators that he, being an MLA, is allowed to have “some privileges” which he was being denied, an officer disclosed. He added, Mr Thambi, however, made it clear that his tricks to avoid interrogation would not earn him any result.r
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