CALCUTTA, 23 March 2005 — A police squad from Uttar Pradesh left in a huff yesterday after Calcutta police refused to help them kill a group of wanted gangsters from the northern state in cold blood, a senior West Bengal government official said.
A special task force of Uttar Pradesh police tracked down five suspects — reportedly associates of Chhota Shakeel and Bablu Srivastava — to Park Circus locality of south Calcutta but the trail suddenly went cold.
For 10 days, the UP squad pulled out all stops to find them. Unable to make any headway on their own, they approached Gyanwant Singh, deputy commissioner of the detective department of Calcutta Police, for help.
The policemen from UP bluntly told Singh about their mission to eliminate the five men at any cost. Singh tried to reason with them but they stuck to their guns. They announced that as the Uttar Pradesh government had “sanctioned” the encounter, they were duty-bound to gun them down.
A flabbergasted Singh then took them to Calcutta Police Commissioner Prasun Mukherjee. The UP policemen sang the same tune before the police chief. Mukherjee tried to convince them not to kill the wanted men, but to no avail. The West Bengal government official said Mukherjee then lost his temper and gave them a dressing down. Without mincing words, he declared that he would not allow an encounter to take place in Calcutta, come what may.
“We will help you to arrest them so that they are tried for the crimes they have committed. But there is no question of assisting you in eliminating them”, said Mukherjee.
Mukherjee added that the UP squad refused to divulge the names of the wanted men. “They said we will provide the names only if you agree in principle to help us kill them in cold blood. When we refused, they stormed out of the police headquarters”, said Mukherjee.
Calcutta police seem to have learned a lesson from its past mistakes. The city police was in the dock a few years ago after a police squad from Punjab gunned down a Sikh couple in the Tiljala area. Another team from UP went on a shooting spree in the heart of the city killing four.
The cold-blooded killings outraged Calcuttans, particularly human rights activists. The West Bengal government wriggled out by claiming that the murderous police squads had kept Calcutta police in the dark.
