Kolkata: Tulu Mondal a.k.a. Mohammad Nazibuddin, the absconding stone quarry owner from Birbhum district of West Bengal, on Wednesday approached a single-judge bench of the Calcutta High Court through his counsel, seeking protection from coercive police action, including arrest.
The petition was admitted by the single-judge bench of Justice Saugata Bhattacharya. However, the first date of hearing in the matter is yet to be finalised.
Tulu Mondal has gone absconding after the Birbhum district police, last month, recovered Rs 28 crore in cash and 15 kilograms of gold biscuits, with an estimated market value of Rs 22 crore, from the residence of one of his relatives, Minar Mondal.
Minar admitted to the police that the recovered cash and gold were owned by Tulu and he was just entrusted to keep them for him. Thereafter, the police sealed the residence of Tulu at Suri in Birbhum district.
Now it is to be seen whether the Calcutta High Court grants him the interim protection from coercive police action, including arrest.
As per the latest information available so far, Tulu Mondal’s assets worth Rs 220 crore have been ‘frozen’. This includes gold and cash worth around Rs 50 crore recovered from Minar’s residence.
Tulu, who started his life as a daily wage earner, witnessed a meteoric rise in his financial fortune during the previous Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress regime, as a close confidant of the erstwhile district president of Trinamool Congress in Birbhum, Anubrata Mondal.
Anubrata, who had spent months behind bars after he was arrested first by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and then by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in connection with the multi-crore cattle smuggling scam in West Bengal, is currently with the “rebel but majority” faction in Trinamool Congress led by the expelled party legislator, Ritabrata Banerjee.
Besides the state police, the ED has begun the preparatory process to start a probe against Tulu. The central agency officials are currently collecting information from the Birbhum district police in the matter.
Tulu Mondal’s name had also come up in the cattle smuggling case in 2022. He was under the ED’s watch in 2022, and at that time, the Central investigators raided his house and office.
(IANS)
