Poll officer goes missing from Nadia
Kolkata: An election officer posted at Nadia district in Bengal has gone missing since Thursday. Arnab Roy was the nodal election officer in-charge of EVM (electronic voting machines) and VVPATs (voter verified paper audit trail) in the Ranaghat parliamentary constituency.
Nadia has two parliamentary constituencies - Ranaghat and Krishnanagar - where elections are due on April 29, in the fourth phase of the seven-phase Lok Sabha elections.
According to police sources, Roy was last seen having his lunch in the afternoon at Bipradas Pal Chowdhury Institute of Technology, under Kotwali police station area on Thursday.
He had joined his duty as per schedule in the morning and his driver claimed that he had seen the officer getting into the college after he dropped him off at the campus in the morning.
The missing officer's wife went to the police station on Thursday night and lodged a missing complaint. She was accompanied by the District Magistrate of Nadia Sumit Gupta. "We have already lodged a missing diary. The police have started investigation," Gupta said.
The district administration has alerted the Election Commission in Delhi and the Chief Electoral Officer of Bengal Ariz Aftab about Roy's disappearance.
"I have heard about the incident. It has nothing to do with the elections. It is some personal or family-related issue. He may be depressed. We have already appointed someone else in his place," said Ajay V Nayak, Special Observer in Bengal.
According to senior police officers, Roy was last seen at Shantipur in Nadia. The officer's two mobile phones have been found switched-off. The sleuths are trying to track the mobile tower locations of his phones and are scanning the CCTV footages from in and around the place for further leads in the case.
The car of the officer has been seized by the police for the sake of investigation. The CEO's office has sought a report of the missing case from the DM.
It may be mentioned that in May last year after the Panchayat Elections, the mutilated body of Rajkumar Roy, who was a presiding officer of an election booth in Raiganj's Itahar, was found on railway tracks near Sonadangi, North Dinajpur. Roy was a government school teacher at Rahatpur High Madrasa.
