Sujay Krishna Bhadra a.k.a. Kalighater Kaku (uncle of Kalighat), arrested in connection with the multi-crore school recruitment case in West Bengal, is constantly trying to project former state education minister and Trinamool Congress secretary general Partha Chatterjee as the main and the only kingpin in the alleged scam during his interrogation by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) officials, sources said.
According to them, Bhadra is trying to constantly plug in Chatterjee’s name even in issues where there was no available evidence about the involvement of the former state education minister.
From this approach of the Bhadra during the course of investigation, sources said, doubts galore that the accused is trying to mislead the investigators and divert attention from nastier and bigger secrets in the entire game.
Sources said that Bhadra even tried to mislead the interrogating sleuths regarding his links with Trinamool Congress legislator and former president of West Bengal Board of Primary Education (WBBPE) Manik Bhattacharya, who is also in judicial custody on charges of his alleged links with the school recruitment case.
“During interrogation, Bhadra claimed that he got introduced to Bhattacharya only in 2021. However, the recovered WhatsApp chat history from his mobile phones establishes Bhadra’s communication with Bhattacharya since 2018. Surely, he is trying to divert a lot of information which we expect to churn out during the next two weeks of his custody with us,” said an ED associate.
On Wednesday only a special court of Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) in Kolkata remanded Bhadra to ED custody till June 14. Prior to that on May 30, the central agency sleuths arrested him after a marathon investigation for over 12 hours.
The ED counsel on Wednesday also informed the court about one civic volunteer, Rahul Bera, who was instructed by Bhadra to delete all the electronic data related to the case.
ED sources said that Bera will be summoned at the agency’s office soon and questioned him together with Bhadra. Sources said that four types of electronic data, namely mobile data, system acquisition, physical acquisition and file acquisition were deleted and later recovered by the ED sleuths.
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