india

Updated: Mar 06, 2019 23:20 IST

A 38-year-old polling booth-level worker of West Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) was shot dead in Murshidabad district on Tuesday night.

Gouranga Mondal is the second ruling party member to have been killed since February 25 when TMC office bearer, Nazimul Sheikh, was killed near Murshidabad’s Berhampore town.

Police have arrested one person so far in connection with Sheikh’’s murder though as many as five were named in the FIR including a former Murshidabad zilla parishad sabhadhipati Shiladitya Haldar and a former councillor of Berhampore municipality Hiru Haldar.

Both of them are from the Congress. Mondal was returning home from Kandi area, where he had gone for a training that the TMC had organised for election work, when he was shot dead.

TMC’s Kandi subdivision president, Goutam Roy, accused Congress workers of killing Mondal to regain the party’s lost ground in the area.

“In the evening when he was returning home, some goons stopped his motorbike around 250 metres from his house and fired three shots at him. To ensure his death, the goons also hurled two crude bombs at him,” said Roy.

District Congress spokesperson, Jayanta Das, denied the allegation. “It has become a practice for Trinamool leaders to point fingers at us whenever their men are killed in factional feuds,” said Das.

Kandi police station in charge Prasanta Patra said one of the four accused— Sukhen Pal — has been arrested while his three alleged accomplices were on the run. “We are conducting raids to nab others [Akshay Pal, Sishir Pal, and Arun Ghosh],” he added.

Sukhen Pal worked as a civic police volunteer with the Kandi police station.