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RG Kar rape-murder: Bengal’s ex-Panihati chairman held over ‘hasty cremation’
Bengal police arrested ex-Panihati chairman Somnath Dey in the probe into the alleged hasty cremation of the RG Kar rape-murder victim.
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The West Bengal police arrested former Panihati municipality chairman and Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader Somnath Dey from a guest house in Bengaluru on Thursday on charges of hastily cremating the body of the junior doctor who was raped and murdered inside Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College and Hospital on July 9, 2024, police officers aware of the matter said.
“Dey had been absconding since June. After the state government ordered a fresh probe into the cremation, a police team followed his trail in several cities, including Hyderabad, but Dey managed to give them the slip. He will be produced before a Bengaluru court today and brought to Bengal on transit remand,” a police officer said, requesting anonymity.
In August, the Barrackpore police commissionerate arrested former TMC councillor Sanjib Mukherjee from Panihati and former TMC legislator Nirmal Ghosh from Odisha on the same charges.
The two arrests were made days after chief minister Suvendu Adhikari ordered an inquiry into the alleged hasty cremation and named the three TMC leaders from Panihati in North 24 Parganas district as prime suspects. The deceased’s family also accused the three.
Nirmal Ghosh, too, had been absconding since July 11, when his son, Tirthankar, was arrested in another criminal case.
Ratna Debnath, the deceased’s mother and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Panihati MLA, said, “Dey’s arrest was inevitable. They all played a key role in the conspiracy behind my daughter’s murder.”
The junior doctor’s body was found at Kolkata’s RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, where she was a student, on the morning of August 9, 2024. The postmortem was completed within hours and the body was cremated by evening.
On August 9 this year, the chief minister ordered a probe at an event held in Panihati in the junior doctor’s memory.
“The CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation) is probing the main crime and also the alleged corruption at RG Kar Hospital under orders from the Calcutta high court. I cannot do anything there, but I have found one aspect that the police can probe. It is the cremation at the obscure Nataghat crematorium in the Ghola police station area,” Adhikari said.
“In the cremation schedule, it was the third body on the list that day, but the number was changed from three to one. According to rules, relatives of a deceased person have to pay a cremation fee and sign documents, but the victim’s family did neither,” Adhikari added.
