Two separate Public Interest Litigations (PILs) were filed in the Calcutta High Court on Monday on the blast in an illegal firecracker unit at Duttapukur in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district.

While the first PIL has been filed by Leader of Opposition in Assembly Suvendu Adhikari, the second petitioner is state BJP leader Rajarshi Lahiri.

Both the PILs have been filed at the division bench of Chief Justice T.S. Sivagnanam and Justice Hiranmay Bhattacharya.

In both the pleas, the petitioners have demanded a National Investigation Agency (NIA) probe into the matter.

This comes a day after State BJP president and the party’s Lok Sabha member Dr Sukanta Majumdar wrote a letter to the Union Home Minister Amit Shah seeking a NIA probe in the matter.

In his petition Adhikari has specially mentioned how in an earlier development, the state government resorted to non- cooperation with the NIA sleuths on the latter’s investigation on communal clashes on the occasion of Ram Navami processions this year despite a clear order from the Calcutta High Court for a central agency probe.

“I have appealed to the court to take note of the non-cooperation extended by the state administration to the central agency in the past case,” Adhikari said on Monday.

According to him, the impact of the blast prima facie suggests that the event was not a result of the accumulated raw material for ordinary firecrackers. “It seems that there might be something more serious in the matter. So naturally the state government and state government will hide a
a lot of things and only NIA sleuths can reveal the real story after a thorough investigation,” the leader of the opposition said.

He also pointed out that the recovery of stone chips from the site of the blast suggests that manufacturing of crude bombs might have taken place there under the garb of a firecracker warehouse.

(The story has been published via a syndicated feed with a modified headline.)