KOLKATA: More than seven weeks after the lynching of a man at an NRS Hospital hostel , detectives on Monday arrested four senior medical students for allegedly tying him up and beating him to death. One of them is a final year student and the rest are in the third year.

This is being seen as a bold move by the Lalbazar police HQ — the arrest orders came right from the top after day-long deliberations. Police have earlier been criticized for going slow with the investigation. What makes it significant is that police overcame stiff resistance from the hospital administration and political leaders not to arrest any medical student. Investigators have not ruled out more arrests.

TOI was the first to mention four suspects in a front page report three weeks ago. The first to be nabbed on Monday was Javed Akhtar, 21, a native of Chopra in Uttar Dinajpur. Jalpaiguri resident Anurag Sarkar, 24, was next, followed by final year student Yusuf Jameel from Samsergunj in Murshidabad. Finally, Arijit Mondal, 23, of Khatra in Bankura was arrested.

Police sources said that it was first-year student Jasimuddin — arrested earlier along with two canteen workers — who spilled the names in his confessional statement before a magistrate about 10 days ago. A special team led by the anti-homicide OC and DC-DD (II) Sumanjit Roy spent the past week collecting evidence against the accused. All of them will be produced in a Sealdah court on Tuesday.

“We arrested all the accused between 4.30pm and 6.35pm after they were summoned to Lalbazar and questioned. We found anomalies in their statements. We had leads from Jasimuddin’s statement but carried out the arrests after finding other corroborative evidence,” said special additional CP-crime Pallab Kanti Ghosh.

Jasimuddin, a Malda native, had admitted to his crime just hours after his arrest. Sources said all five arrested students lived in the second and third floors of the hostel. “All of them were directly involved in the beating of Korban Sah. It was they who took the decision along with a few others to tie him up and attacked him with bamboo sticks,” said a source. Korban was beaten to death after he was sneaked into the hostel on the night of November 16.

