Inebriated tourists attack police personnel in Mandarmani beach

Revellers beat up police personnel when they were restrained from going into the sea at Mandarmani in Monday. Seven persons including three women were arrested on charges of beating policemen on duty. The accused were inebriated when they started abusing the policemen using derogatory language.

Soon the verbal attack turned into physical assault by the accused. They were produced at Kanth court. Four of them were remanded to judicial custody. Two women got conditional bail.

Police said that seven youth including those three women had gone to Mandarmani on Monday. Three among those seven were the students of Kolkata’s Asutosh College. They were intoxicated when they started walking towards the beach. They tried to bathe in the sea, when police personnel stopped them.

“They used motorbikes in the beach, which was banned by the administration a few weeks ago. They did not pay heed to it when the hotelier tried to convince them. They were also intoxicated and we restricted them from going to the sea,” said a police officer.

The officer added that the youth, particularly those three girls started to beat the civic police personnel. An ASI with women police constable had gone to the spot to stop them. But the youth again pounced on them and beat them black and blue. The women then came back to the hotel to beat up the manager there.

It is to be recalled that a person was swept away in the Bay of Bengal, by the strong current of water at the sea beach of Mandarmani recently, just a day after the state administration decided to install surveillance cameras to inspect the situation 24X7.

Mandarmani hosts a huge number tourist in almost every month a year. But despite the repeated alert on the part of district administration, many tourist teams from Kolkata had gone to the sea. They are often inebriated and unruly and do not pay heed to the alert. A few weeks ago, three Kolkata boys, two of them studying in the UK, were killed in a head-on collision between two cars on the long.

It is also to be remembered that a youth was killed when he attempted a para-gliding at the beach in 2015. Tarun Ghosh was on a holiday at Mandarmani, with his family when an unfortunate incident occurred. Ghosh, an adventure aficionado, in an attempt to make his journey memorable, enrolled his name for parasailing with a company named New Bengal Adventures.

As soon as the parachute went into the air, the towing car came too close to an electric pillar due to the heavy tides. The parachute further went off track due to heavy rains and wind. The parachute got stuck in the pillar but the towing car didn’t stop.

The pillar was pull up from the soil and was dragged for a distance along with Ghosh’s body. The state government decided to install close circuit camera in the beaches of Mandarmani, Digha and Tajpur to keep a close look at the happenings there. In the first step, the installation will be made at Mandarmani, and then it would be continued at Digha and Tajpur as well.