Kolkata police have arrested three people including a doctor with "mental health issues" for their alleged involvement in sending a letter to the wife of former West Bengal chief secretary Alapan Bandyopadhyay threatening to kill him, a senior officer said on Tuesday.
Bandyopadhyay, a 1987 batch IAS officer who retired in May this year, is currently the chief adviser to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
The officer said the man who had typed out the letter was arrested from Ballygunge on Monday. He gave away the names of the doctor posted at the KPC Medical College and his driver, who were arrested from Raja Rammohan Sarani and Manicktala respectively, he said.
The initial probe has revealed that the doctor, identified as Arindam Sen, has been sending such threat letters to several people and, on October 25 alone, he had posted similar letters to the Director, Medical Education, Science Secretary, Principal of the Nil Ratan Sircar Medical College and Hospital, apart from the Vice Chancellor of Calcutta University, who is Bandyopadhyay's wife.
“The doctor used to send his driver with draft of the letters to the typist who used to type them out. The driver then used to get them mailed from the post office. He has been sending such letters to several people for the last two years. It seems he has mental health issues. We are probing the matter,” the officer said.
"The doctor himself stated that he is under mental stress. In some cases, he wrote the letters as he had some grudge. For instance he took Gour Hari Mishra's name because his wife had humiliated him. In some cases, he was influenced by TV news. This needs further probe," he said, adding seven letters with similar content were posted from the Sarat Bose Road post office on October 25.
Gour Hari Mishra is the person whose identity the doctor used to send the letter to Bandyopadhyay's wife.
"We got the names of some suspected persons from those to whom he had written letters using someone else's identity. It's a long list. We have taken help of technical analysis and CCTV footages," he said.
Bandyopadhyay's wife Sonali Chakrabarty, who is the Vice Chancellor of Calcutta University, received the typed letter that threatened to kill her husband. "Madam, your husband will be killed. Nobody can save the life of your husband," the letter dated October 22 and purportedly signed by Gour Hari Mishra, who claimed he was from the Department of Chemical Technology at Rajabazar Science College in the city, read, the officer said.
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