Suvendu aide murder: Three arrested from Bihar, UP; remanded to police custody

According to senior police officers, the payment and tracking of phone locations helped the SIT reach Raj, Vicky, and Mayank.

Kolkata: Three men have been arrested from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in connection with the murder of West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari’s aide, Chandranath Rath, who was shot dead on the outskirts of Kolkata on Monday.

The three accused were remanded to police custody after they were brought to Kolkata and produced before a court in the North 24 Parganas district of the state on Monday.

The breakthrough in the investigation came less than a week after Rath was shot dead at Doharia in Madhyamgram in the North 24 Parganas district of the state.

A UPI payment made at a toll plaza for one of the cars used by the assailants led the Special Investigation Team, constituted by the West Bengal police for the investigation into the case, to Mayank Raj and Vicky Maurya in Buxar, Bihar, and to Raj Singh in Ballia, Uttar Pradesh. The three were arrested late on Sunday and brought to Kolkata, a senior police official said.

The police are looking for at least five others in connection with the murder.

Rath was a personal assistant to Adhikari, and he was murdered just three days before the Bharatiya Janata Party heavyweight was sworn in as the new chief minister of the saffron party’s government in the state.

Adhikari succeeded Mamata Banerjee, the supremo of the Trinamool Congress, which ruled the state for 15 years, but was voted out of power in the just-concluded assembly elections.

Rath, who was well known within the BJP circle, was on his way to his home in Madhyamgram at around 10:30 pm on May 6 when a car came in front of the SUV he was travelling in.

As the SUV slowed down, the assailants, riding pillion on a motorcycle, came close to it and opened fire at him, and the driver of the car, Buddhadev Bera, repeatedly at point-blank range.

Rath (42), was rushed to a nearby hospital, where the doctors declared him dead. Bera also suffered serious injuries and underwent surgery at a hospital on May 7.

The car and the two motorcycles used in the attack were later recovered, but they all carried fake registration numbers with chassis details erased. The bullet shells recovered from the spot indicated Glock pistols were used to shoot at Rath and Bera.

The investigation into the case and the study of the CCTV footage later revealed that another car was used in the murder. The occupants of the car made a payment using UPI at the toll plaza near Nivedita Setu on the Hooghly River in Howrah.

The payment and tracking of phone locations helped the SIT reach Raj, Vicky, and Mayank, according to the senior police officers.

Adhikari stopped short of blaming the TMC for the murder but alleged that had he not defeated Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee in Bhabanipur in the just-concluded elections, and had Rath not been his personal assistant, the incident would not have happened.

Soon after Rath was murdered, the TMC issued a statement, condemned the incident, and demanded an investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) under the monitoring of a court.

Rath, who had earlier served the Indian Air Force and worked for a corporate organisation, has been a close aide of Adhikari from his days in the TMC, and continued to be with him even after he defected to the BJP.

He was the fourth person associated with Adhikari to have died in mysterious circumstances. Earlier, Pradip Jha, his personal assistant, Subhabrata Chakraborty, his bodyguard, and Pulak Lahiri, his counting agent, had met unnatural deaths in 2013, 2018 and 2021, respectively.