Bullets amid kids and blood donors

Habra (North 24-Parganas), Dec. 20: Children wept in panic and blood donors ran helter-skelter as gunmen fired wildly at a drawing contest-cum-blood camp here today, killing two men and proving that no place was immune from political violence in Bengal.

One of the dead being a Congress activist and the other a Trinamul Congress worker, fingers were immediately pointed towards the CPM, which denied any role in the attack during which four bombs too were hurled. Police were trying to verify claims that a young girl had taken a bullet hit while confirming gunshot and splinter injuries to five people.

Links were quickly drawn to the campus violence raging across the state - on which the chief minister dwelt at length today - which means the stakes involved not Writers' Buildings but a college union room in this district town 60km from Calcutta.

Trinamul Chhatra Parishad chief Baishanar Chatterjee said the two slain men - party activist Ranjit Roy and the Congress's Bapi Choudhury - had been working together to defeat the CPM student wing, SFI, at next month's elections at Habra Chaitanya College. "The CPM hired the killers," he said.

The gunmen came around 12.45pm, just after Trinamul civic chief Tapati Dutta and local CPM MLA Pranab Bhattacharya had left, having spent 15 minutes sharing the dais at the inauguration.

Seven people were donating blood and about 30 children, mostly aged six to 12, sat making sketches in a field near the clubhouse of organisers Yuva Sanskritik Chakra.

The attackers, who came on three motorbikes, tried to drag away Congress activist Bapi, a rice exporter in his early 30s, at gunpoint, said blood camp president and local Trinamul leader Kanchan Ghosh.

Ranjit, 24, intervened and was shot in the head. The gunmen began firing at random and exploded bombs, during which Bapi took a bullet in the chest, Ghosh said. "We ran for our lives. Those who were giving blood also ran."

Class I student Payel Roy was drawing a landscape when she heard one loud explosion after another. "I was afraid and began crying. I was looking around desperately for my father. The children around me too were crying," she said.

Father Prafulla, waiting with his bicycle at one side of the field, immediately ran towards her. "I picked her up and ran, leaving my cycle behind," he said.

Ranjit was declared dead on arrival at a Habra hospital and Bapi died at a nursing home in nearby Barasat. Another Trinamul supporter, Bapi Bhattacharya, 22, is in the same nursing home with a bullet injury in his leg.

Bapi Choudhury had been a key player in cementing the local alliance with Trinamul, district Congress chief Narayan Saha claimed.

"The CPM killed them. Habra, once a CPM bastion, is slipping from their grip," alleged leader of the Opposition Partha Chatterjee, who visited the town with Trinamul colleague and Union minister Mukul Roy. "We are yet to identify the attackers," said S.K. Purakayastha, inspector-general (law and order). The Congress has called a 12-hour bandh in Habra tomorrow with Trinamul support.

CPM leaders Amitava Nandy and Benoy Konar denied their party's involvement in the attack. Pranab Mukherjee said: "The government has to ensure peace (and) must get the political parties to act with restraint."

In Raniganj, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee accused the Opposition of unleashing violence in colleges: "After winning a few Lok Sabha seats, they think they will take control of student unions by using force in college elections."