Bengal TMC councillor arrested after bomb goes off in flat he illegally occupied
Md Riyazuddin, the TMC councillor from Ward No 4 in Bengal’s Titagarh town, was arrested along with two of his associates
Kolkata: A Trinamool Congress (TMC) councillor from Titagarh town municipality in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district was arrested on Monday, hours after a bomb went off in his flat in a multi-storied building, causing substantial damage to the property, police said.
Md Riyazuddin, the councillor from Ward No 4 in Titagarh town was arrested in the afternoon along with two of his associates.
A case was registered after the bomb blew off the outer wall of the fifth floor flat in the morning. The debris landed on a nearby shanty damaging its tin roof. Cracks developed on the walls of the adjacent flats, but the residents did not suffer any injury, police said.
“The explosion was quite powerful according to local people. Experts will visit the spot and check what sort of explosive was kept there,” Indra Badan Jha, deputy commissioner of police (central), Barrackpore, told the media.
Anil Gupta, the real estate promoter who built the building a few years ago, alleged that the TMC councillor occupied the flat by force and never paid the price.
“I kept asking for the money and the councillor always dodged the issue. His men used to frequent the flat,” Jha told the media.
Police did not comment on this dispute.
Md Riyazuddin denied the allegations before he was arrested.
“This is a conspiracy. Police have to find out who the bomb was meant for. I never lived in that flat. Many people frequented it. The door was never locked,” he said.
“And why is this question of ownership being raised now? It is just a corridor, not a proper flat,” Riyazuddin said.
State TMC leaders did not comment on the arrest till 7 pm.
Arjun Singh, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s former Lok Sabha member from Barrackpore, alleged that the explosion once again exposed the law-and-order situation in Titagarh and its surrounding industrial region, which is densely populated.
Singh said: “Who can vouch that Riyazuddin is not working for Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB)? The Army intelligence unit should interrogate him. It is an open secret that terror outfits based in Bangladesh are active in Bengal.”
The incident brought under focus similar explosions in the region in recent years.
In December 2022, an 11-year-old schoolboy was critically injured in Titagarh town when a crude bomb went off near a bonfire that some slum children had lit by the roadside to beat the cold. The probe revealed that local criminals kept the bomb behind a trash bin near which the bonfire was lit by the children. The heat triggered the explosion, investigators found.
This happened less than a month after a six-year-old boy died in a similar explosion at a slum in the adjacent Kankinara area.
On September 17, 2022, there was widespread panic when a crude bomb went off on the roof of Titagarh Free India High School. Although around 1000 of the 1300 students were attending classes in the lower floors, nobody was injured. Police later arrested some teenagers on charges of throwing the bomb from an adjacent building, allegedly to scare a student with whom they had some rivalry.
