Kolkata, Aug 3 (IANS) The police on Monday arrested Sitesh Pramanik, the manager of the absconding stone-quarry owner Tulu Mondal a.k.a. Mohammad Nazibuddin, in West Bengal’s Birbhum district.
Last week, the police arrested Minar Mondal, a relative of Tulu Mondal, after cash worth Rs 28 crore and 15 kilograms of gold with an estimated market value of around Rs 22 crore were recovered from his residence in Birbhum.
During interrogation, Minar confessed that Tulu Mondal owned the cash and gold, and he was only responsible for storing them at his residence. Thereafter, the cops seized Tulu Mondal’s residence at Suri in Birbhum district.
Now, on Monday morning, the cops arrested Mondal’s manager, Sitesh Pramanik, and will question him about the source of money and gold recovered from Minar’s residence last week. He will be presented at a district court later in the day, and the public prosecutor will seek his police custody.
“We had been looking for Sitesh ever since the recovery of this huge amount of money and gold from Minar’s residence. Earlier, Sheikh Wasim, another relative of Tulu Mondal, was arrested from Siliguri in Darjeeling district on Saturday night. He was trying to escape to neighbouring Nepal when he was nabbed. Wasim is Tulu’s nephew. Now Sitesh has been arrested. This is the third arrest in the matter after Minar and Wasim,” a Birbhum District Police officer said.
Meanwhile, Tulu Mondal continues to be on the run. As per information gathered by the cops, he is probably in Dubai now with a couple of his close family members. Interrogations of Minar and Wasim did not yield results on this count as they could not specify Tulu’s current whereabouts.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has commenced the preparatory process for a probe against Tulu. The central agency officials are currently collecting information from the Birbhum District Police in the matter.
Tulu Mondal was known in the district as a close confidant of Anubrata Mondal, the former Trinamool Congress’ Birbhum district president, who had earlier spent days behind bars after being arrested first by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and then by the ED in 2022 in connection with his involvement in the cattle smuggling case in West Bengal.
Tulu Mondal’s name had also come up in the cattle smuggling case. He was under the ED scanner in 2022. At that time, the Central investigators raided his house and office.
–IANS
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