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Updated: Apr 18, 2019 15:17 IST

The body of a BJP’s 22-year-old youth wing leader was found hanging from a tree in West Bengal’s Purulia district on Thursday, police said, as the state witnessed polling in three of its 42 parliamentary constituencies.

Polling will be held in the area along with seven other constituencies on May 12, the sixth round of the seven-phased Lok Sabha election. The votes will be counted on May 23.

The father of Sishupal Sahis, a Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha leader of Arsha area in the district, Jadav Sahis is a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) panchayat member of the area.

Before this, a BJP worker Trilochan Mahato, 18, was found hanging from a tree in a village of Purulia district on May 30 last year. Seventy-two hours later on June 2, another BJP worker Dulal Kumar, 32, was found hanging from a high tension electric pole about 5 km away from Supurdhi village where Mahato’s body was found.

The two incidents had triggered such a furore that BJP president Amit Shah visited the district on June 28, 2018, to address a public rally in Balarampur.

“We have found a body hanging in Arsha area. We are conducting an investigation. We are waiting for the post mortem report to determine whether it was murder or suicide,” Purulia district’s superintendent of police Akash Magharia said.

BJP leaders claimed on Thursday Sishupal Sahis was killed and then hanged.

“After the panchayat elections last year, our workers were killed in Balarampur area of Purulia district. Now just before the Lok Sabha elections, Trinamool Congress supporters have again murdered a youth leader of ours,” the BJP’s Purulia district unit president Bidyasagar Chakraborty alleged.

However, Trinamool Congress leader Shantiram Mahato said they had nothing to do with the young man’s death.

“The BJP is playing dirty politics ahead of the poll. The youth committed suicide and they are trying to malign before the elections alleging we have killed him,” the Trinamool leader said.

On Wednesday, the body of a 55-year-old worker of the Communist Party of India(Marxist) Ajay Mandal was found in Patharpratima area of South 24 Parganas district. The CPI(M) leaders have alleged that Mandal was killed by TMC supporters when he had gone to catch fish.

However, leaders of the ruling party dismissed the charges.

The BJP and the Trinamool have traded similar charges of political violence in West Bengal, with both parties accusing each other of “unleashing terror” in the state and trying to disrupt peace.

The eastern state witnessed wide-scale violence ahead of and during the panchayat elections held in 2018.