The first arrest in the blast at an illegal firecracker warehouse at Duttapukur in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district in which seven people were killed, was made by the police on Monday with the nabbing of a partner.
The arrested man has been identified as Shafiqul Islam and is the second partner in the entity. The land on which the said illegal firecracker factory was operating, is owned by Shafiqul Islam.
The principal partner of the said illegal firecracker warehouse, Keramat Sheikh is still missing with contradictory rumours floating around regarding his disappearance. While a section of the local people have claimed that Keramat has absconded immediately after the blast, another section claims he died in the explosion on Sunday morning.
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Meanwhile, confusion is also going on over the actual death figure in the explosion. While the official figure of casualties as maintained by the administration till Monday morning stands at seven, the local people have claimed that there is no trace of at least 10 more people who were present at the factory during the time of the explosion.
The leader of the opposition in the West Bengal Assembly, Suvendu Adhikari has already accused the state police administration of understating the death figure and also claimed that as per information available to him, at least 10 people have died in the explosion.
Incidentally, as per police records, Keramat Sheikh was arrested earlier for running an illegal firecracker unit which was also closed down by the police at that point in time. However, he got released on bail soon and in no time he again started the same business.
The police find a strange semblance of the operation of Sheikh with that of Bhanu Bag, the owner of a similar illegal firecracker entity at Egra in the East Midnapore district of West Bengal where a similar explosion took a toll of nine lives on May 16 this year. Bag himself was one of the casualties at that point in time.
Like Sheikh, Bag was also arrested earlier on the same grounds and after being released again started that illegal firecracker business.
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