SHILLONG: Kolkata Police commissioner Rajeev Kumar faced eight hours of questioning from CBI officials here on Monday, half of it face-to-face with former Trinamool Congress MP Kunal Ghosh.Monday’s session, the third straight day of questioning, took the number of hours the KP boss has faced CBI interrogators to more than 24 hours . Kumar will now face CBI interrogators again on Tuesday — as the CBI continues its efforts to recreate the events leading to Saradha boss Sudipta Sen slipping out of Kolkata on April 10, 2013, and the first police raids on his offices over a week later — even as all indications are that Ghosh may be allowed to return to Kolkata. “Ghosh was permitted to leave Shillong after the interrogation was over. But he will appear (for questioning) again if the agency asks him,” his lawyer, Ayan Chakraborty, said on Monday.Ghosh, who has been critical of the state government machinery’s handling of the Saradha probe in the past, termed his interrogation along with the police commissioner’s as a “moral victory”. He also asked politicians, in a Facebook post, to keep away from the probe now that “the CBI is trying to dig out what it should have done long back”. Kumar refused to speak to the media.Kumar was quizzed on some of Ghosh’s specific allegations and particularly about events from April 1, 2013, when Sen first tried to slip out of Kolkata, to April 26, 2013, when the state formed a Special Investigation Team. Sen, along with aides Debjani Mukherjee and Arvind Chowhan, slipped out on April 10 but, according to Ghosh, they held a meeting at Nizam Palace with “a political bigwig” before leaving.The first FIR was registered against Sen on April 16 and this was followed by three more FIRs on April 19, 20 and 22. Sen, Mukherjee and Chowhan were finally arrested from Hotel Snowland in Sonmarg, Jammu and Kashmir, on April 23.Some of the questions to Kumar revolved around an April 18 Bidhannagar Police raid on Sen’s Midland Park headquarters in Salt Lake. Several raids followed over the next few days at multiple locations, including an IT firm that maintained the firm’s database. Documents and hard disks were among the seizures and, on April 26, the state handed over the entire probe to the SIT.The CBI has harped on the charge that not all the seized evidence had been handed over by the SIT. Kumar’s line, however, has been that he had several responsibilities as the then Bidhannagar Police commissioner and the Ponzi probe was only one among them.He delegated work and responsibilities to his subordinates and colleagues and, therefore, might not be able to talk about specific seizures made after raids that happened six years back.The CBI team, which was joined by two more officers of superintendent-of-police rank on Monday, sought Kumar’s explanation about call-detail records that, they claimed, were doctored or tampered with before it was handed over to the agency.

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