Bhubaneswar: Thousands gathered at Chak Bahadurpur village in West Bengal’s Murshidabad on Friday, as the body of 19-year-old migrant labourer, Sheikh Juel Rana, arrived from Odisha.
Sheikh was lynched in Shanti Nagar area under Ainthapali police limits of Sambalpur on the evening of December 24 by a group of six men, while he along with seven other migrant workers from West Bengal were at a tea stall. They were employed at a construction site there.
While the Odisha Police attributed the murder to an altercation over a bidi that escalated into violence, the workers claimed they were assaulted on suspicion of being Bangladeshis.
A co-worker, who was present at the spot, alleged that the attack began with a demand for identity proof. “The miscreants first asked for bidi and then sought our Aadhaar cards. Later, they rammed Juel’s head against a hard object,” Majhar Khan, one of the injured labourers, was quoted as saying by news agency PTI.
Another worker, Nizamuddin Khan, claimed that the assailants repeatedly referred to them as Bangladeshis. The two injured workers are still in the hospital receiving treatment.
On Thursday, following the arrest of the six accused, Inspector General of Police, Northern Range, Himansu Lal, had also stressed that the murder was not a premeditated or targeted attack. “The murder was the outcome of a sudden provocation. The incident was not driven by any intention of targeting any particular category,” said Lal, without divulging the cause of provocation.
Elaborating further, Sambalpur additional superintendent of police Srimant Barik later said that the workers were friends with a particular group of locals in Sambalpur and often shared meals with them. While under the influence of alcohol, the locals demanded a bidi, which sparked a quarrel between them. In a moment of sudden provocation, one individual was attacked, resulting in a head injury that ultimately led to his death, he added.
The police issued these statements after the TMC mounted a sharp attack on the BJP government in Odisha over reports that one of the injured linked the attack to a campaign against illegal Bangladeshis. The party claimed that the three migrant workers had gone to Sambalpur on December 20.
“Once again Bengali speaking migrant workers targeted in BJP-ruled state. In Odisha’s Sambalpur one from Murshidabad lynched to death and two others injured after BJP goons attacked them & labelled them as Bangladeshi infiltrators. How many lives of innocent Bengali speaking people the BJP wants? This is nothing but another example on how BJP treats Bengalis. Now the time has come to throw BJP out and common people of Bengal will teach Bangla-Birodhi BJP a lesson democratically in upcoming polls,” TMC Rajya Sabha member and chairman of the state migrant workers welfare board, Samirul Islam, wrote on X.
