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TMC’s Anubrata Mondal remanded in judicial custody again in cattle smuggling case
Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader Anubrata Mondal was arrested by CBI on August 11 and he has been in the custody of the Asansol correctional home since August 24
Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader Anubrata Mondal was once again remanded in judicial custody for two weeks in the cattle smuggling case when he was produced before a special court in Bengal’s West Burdwan district on Wednesday.
Mondal has been in the custody of the Asansol correctional home in West Burdwan since August 24. He was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on August 11.
Mondal’s former bodyguard Sehgal Hossain, one of the co-accused in the case, has been lodged in the same correctional home. He was arrested by CBI on June 10.
Hossain, a West Bengal police constable, was deployed by the government as one of the bodyguards of the TMC’s Birbhum district unit president.
They were both interrogated by CBI inside the correctional home on Tuesday but officials said they did not answer most of the questions.
Mondal and Hossain are both prime suspects in the cattle smuggling case in which thousands of cows seized from smugglers at the India-Bangladesh border were allegedly auctioned to the people seeking to smuggle them out.
CBI has so far found more than 160 property registration documents from government records, officials said. Many of these are recorded as land.
On August 8, CBI filed its third charge-sheet, accusing Hossain of accepting money from several people on Mondal’s behalf. The 41-page charge-sheet mentioned that as many as 59 properties and businesses are registered in the names of members of Hossain’s family. CBI produced records of phone calls that other prime suspects, including Muhammad Enamul Haque, made to Hossain’s mobile phones and claimed that it was Mondal who carried out the conversations.
Mondal denied the charges during interrogation in CBI custody and claimed to have no information about Hossain’s properties, CBI officials said.
On Tuesday, a CBI team visited Bolpur town in Birbhum, where Mondal lives, and questioned his chartered accountant, Manish Kothari, for the third time. CBI suspects that Kothari has knowledge about Mondal’s properties and the two companies owned by his daughter, Sukanya, who is a primary school teacher.
