04 August 2011

Armed Salt Lake robbers batter 65-year-old woman UNSAFE CITY AND DANGEROUS SUBURB, CRIMINALS HAVE A FREE RUN


TIMES NEWS NETWORK 


Kolkata: A buzzing cellphone saved 65-year-old Salt Lake resident Sumitra Mookerjea’s life on Wednesday. But for the ring, she could well have met the fate of 93-year-old Shanta Bhattacharya, who was gagged by robbers and suffocated to death at her Ultadanga apartment last week. 
    Sumitra’s bruises speak of her ordeal — the robbers held a knife to her throat, hit her with an iron rod and slapped her without provocation. She could barely speak of the shock she felt on finding three masked men in her bedroom at 3.45am. Her husband, 72-year-old Devdas Mookerjea, was sleeping in an adjoining room in their twostoried house at Salt Lake’s AH-239. The elderly couple lives alone. 
    The gang brazenly made a front-door entry after breaking the 
locks of the main gate and the grille. “I woke up with a start. 
There were three armed men in 
my room. One of them had a gun. The other one locked my husband’s bedroom from outside while the third held a knife to my throat. I screamed for help. They tied me up and were about to gag me when I pleaded with them not to do so as it would choke me. I promised not to shout again. But one of them suddenly hit me with an iron rod. My knees buckled but he stepped up and slapped me,” Sumitra said. 
    The noise woke Devdas. With memories of the Ultadanga murder-robbery fresh on his mind, he feared the worst when he found his door locked from outside. Trapped and unable to do a thing, Devdas picked up his cellphone and kept calling his wife. “The robbers thought that some outsider had been alerted,” Sumitra said. 
Gang stole jewellery 
Kolkata: The gang lost all its bravado and asked Sumitra to show the rear door with the knife still pointed at her throat. “They fled through the backdoor but snatched whatever ornaments I wore and my cellphone,” she said. 
    Devdas said that the gang had dragged her from the first floor to the ground floor to help them flee. “They untied her before escaping. They were around 25-30 years old and spoke in Bengali,” he said. 
    As the news spread in the locality, relatives rushed to their home. North 24-Parganas SP Champak Bhattacharya and local Trinamool MLA Sujit Bose also visited the Mookerjeas. “A gang of three committed the robbery. The couple has provided us details of what is missing from the house. We are probing the case,” Bhattacharya said. The police videographed the house while fingerprint experts collected samples. 
    The robbery, less than a month after a similar attempt at CF Block, sent shockwaves in the township. “AH block is mostly home to elderly people. The police should be more active in preventing such incidents,” said Gopal Chandra Bandyopadhaya, an elderly neighbour of the Mookerjeas. TNN

BRUISED... Sumitra Mookerjea talks to cops at her home on Wednesday