A CID team led by DSP (Headquarters) Niladri Chakrabarty, SDPO Canning Debashish Sardar and Assistant Field Director of Sunderbans Tiger Reserve Anjan Guha on Saturday night rounded up one of the poachers Paritosh Mondal, who later confessed to his crime during interrogation.

The investigating agency had learnt that the suspects — Paritosh Mondal and another Panchanan Giri — were residents of Kumirmari island in Sunderbans. Accordingly, a huge contingent of police and forest department officials encircled the island and raided the houses of the two poachers located in Sharodpara village of the Sunderbans.

The officials recovered a firearm with one bullet and a suspected tiger thigh bone from the house of Mondal. An old tiger thighbone was found in his possession. “We will hand over the tiger thighbone to the forest department to ascertain if our suspicion is right. If they confirm that it is indeed a tiger bone then a fresh case will be lodged against Mondal,” said Sanjay Mukherjee, Special IG, CID.

On reaching the house of Panachanan Giri, they found Giri to be missing. A musket with six bullets was found from Giri’s house.

Mondal later led the team to the spot where the incident had taken place. Two fired cartridges were found from the spot - compartment five of the Jila forest in the core area of the Sunderbans tiger reserve. The CID believes at least one of the bullets has been fired from the musket recovered from the house of Panchanan Giri. The other weapon, which Mondal had used, is still untraceable.

During interrogations, Mondal confessed that both he and Giri had colluded in such poaching expeditions in the past. In fact, tiger claw marks on Mondal’s body further indicate that this was definitely not his first encounter with big cats. Giri too, had been arrested in 2003 for possessing tiger skin. “It is not even 24 hours since the arrest. The interrogation is still on. Only at the end of the interrogation we will be able to know more details about the poaching nexus. A tiger carcass fetches upto Rs 22-25 lakh in the international black market and is exported to countries like Japan, Korea and China,” said Mukherjee.

According to Mondal, they had shot the tiger around 5.30 pm on October 3, 2008. After firing two bullets, the tiger had leapt into darkness and disappeared. Sine they were scared of getting down the tree top from which they had shot the tiger, the duo waited until next morning. But when they alighted the next morning, they could not trace the tiger. They only learnt about the carcass from the newspapers. On tracing Mondal’s antecedents the police found that he had been the prime accused in a case in the year 1999, which involved the murder of seven people, Mukherjee said.

On October 6, the body of a tiger was found floating on a river in Sunderbans. The CID was handed over the case on October 8. After visits by senior police officers on October 8 and October 10 in Sunderbans, two sub-inspectors of the CID set up camp in Sunderbans since October 15 in disguise and it was they who learnt about the location of the poachers. Three senior forest officials were transferred for failing to discharge their duties. ...