KOLKATA: A night guard, Krishna Lal, was arrested on Wednesday for allegedly assaulting Shankar Mondal, 25, at Kalighat last Sunday. The questioning of two of the arrested men — Kanai Patra, 55, and Lal, 48 — has thrown up details of how Mondal was virtually tortured for over five hours before he lost consciousness. He died the next day, leading his family to allege he was lynched.Police said Mondal was repeatedly slapped and beaten up with rods and pushed around in areas like Satish Mukherjee Road, Masjidpara and Kalighat Park, all in the name of recovering a cellphone reportedly owned by Patra’s son Abhijit.Sources said a local who had come to the police station to identify the accused played a key role in helping cops with Lal’s arrest . “We arrested Lal from SP Mukherjee Road,” said a police source.According to investigators, on Friday night, four men had gone to Mondal’s residence and threatened his sister that he “would be killed if the mobile was not returned.”“Patra told us that he was sleeping when two of Abhijit’s friends came to his house and said Mondal had been cornered. The father-son duo reached the spot and beat up Mondal. For the next three hours — between 3am and 6am — four to five men took Mondal to several local addresses as Patra claimed Mondal kept telling them he had deposited the stolen phone with different people. Patra said it was around 6.15am that they came near the departmental store and he returned home,” said an officer.Police said Mondal was tied to a tree, stripped and denied even water all through the night. “We suspect Mondal was assaulted yet again between 6am and 10am when the men failed to recover the phone. Not once did they contact the police,” said the source.

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