Restaurant owner assault case: Bengal cop issued show cause notice

Kolkata: The Bidhannagar Police Commissionerate in West Bengal have issued a show cause notice to the inspector-in-charge of a local police station in the case of assault on a restaurant owner by actor-turned-politician and Trinamool Congress MLA Soham Chakraborty.

The development comes in the wake of the Calcutta High Court expressing ire over the submission by the Bidhannagar City Police that the CCTV footage did not have any recording of the moment where the celebrity MLA was seen brutally assaulting the restaurant owner Anisul Alam.

While the matter came up for hearing at Calcutta High Court’s single-judge bench of Justice Amrita Sinha, the latter noted that while the police are claiming that there had not been any recording of the moment of assault, the victim of assault has submitted to the court some video footages that clearly show the event of assault.

The next hearing on the matter will be on July 31.

The court also questioned that if the moment of the assault was not recorded in the CCTV installed, from where did the victim submit the footage to the court? Thereafter, the Bidhannagar City Police authorities slapped the show-cause notice to the inspector-in-charge of the local police station under whose jurisdiction the said restaurant comes.

To recall, Chakraborty was caught on camera thrashing Alam inside his restaurant premises on the night of June 7. Later, the actor-turned-politician claimed that he hit Alam for making abusive remarks against Trinamool General Secretary and Lok Sabha MP Abhishek Banerjee.

However, Alam denied the allegation and accused Chakraborty of dragging the name of Abhishek Banerjee to hide his guilt. According to Alam, the row was triggered after he asked the driver and bodyguards of Chakraborty to remove the actor’s car that was parked wrongly in the parking lot.

While Chakraborty in the meantime got an anticipatory bail from a district court in South 24 Parganas district, the victim approached the bench of Justice Sinha for justice. On June 14, Justice Sinha directed the police to preserve the documents related to the case of the assault.