“My world is falling apart,” Arindam Manna told his mother Malati over the phone at 1.37 am this morning. He did not elaborate, nor did he say where he was, but his mother heard a lot of commotion in the background. He hung up abruptly.

Seven hours later, at about 8.30 am, Manna’s body was found on the railway tracks near Mankundu station in Hooghly district about 50 km from Kolkata. He was to be married two months from now.

Manna, 30, was a police sub-inspector attached to the Dum Dum Government Railway Police (GRP). He was also the man who first inspected the body of multimedia professional Rizwanur Rehman in September 2007, and prepared the inquest report. Rizwanur was allegedly driven to kill himself under a train at Ulltadanga near Kolkata by the family of Ashok Todi, a prominent city businessman whose daughter Priyanka he had married only some days ago.

The case is currently under CBI investigation. Three members of the Todi family and three Kolkata Police officers who investigators say abetted Rizwanur’s suicide by mounting unbearable pressure on him to end his marriage with Priyanka, are out on bail. The CBI charge sheet is expected to come up before a Kolkata sessions court in the middle of May. Manna would have been a key CBI witness. The Sheoraphuli police have registered a case of murder.

In their FIR, Manna’s parents said the Sub-Inspector was killed as per a plan, and alleged Ashok Todi, Priyanka’s father, and some police officers were involved in the murder. They mentioned the “pressures” on Manna, and accused the local police of trying to hush up the case immediately after the body was discovered. They said the body — which the police had initially declared ‘unidentified’ — had only narrowly escaped being sent for an autopsy without the family getting to know.

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