Even though Auromita Das, a female student of the medical college, was arrested in connection with the case, the West Bengal Police CID could not make much progress in the case, and it remains unresolved. The police had questioned several members of SFI, the student wing of CPM, but could not find any clue.
Soumitra’s mother had alleged that her son’s friends at the medical college were responsible for his death, as he allegedly discovered indecent activities on the campus. Notably, several students at the medical college had blamed an alleged porn ring in the RG Kar Medical College for the death of Soumitra Biswas.
Talking to the media, students from R.G. Kar Medical College at that time accused pornography, prostitution networks, and shady dealings with women for the ‘murder’ of an innocent. The students claimed that Soumitra was ‘murdered’ and it was all organized and masterminded by state doctors and staged directly within the hostel of one of the city’s best medical institutions. According to his colleagues, Soumitra paid the price for exposing the nasty work of shooting pornographic photos and videos in one or more hostel rooms.
Soumitra was found hanging from the ceiling in his hostel room at Lalit Memorial Hostel, next to the medical college.
“Soumitra, like all of us, knew about it but neither he nor any one of us had the courage to challenge it. But when a close friend of Soumitra, a batchmate, was victimised by the coterie who superimposed her face on another woman’s nude body, he could not control himself,” said an inmate in the hostel.
According to them, the shooting was done primarily on weekends by inviting sex workers into the hostel. “During the crisis, when they couldn’t find a prostitute, they even used dead bodies from the hospital used for dissection. It is a massive racket being supported by a political leader. Then they would superimpose models’ faces over naked photos of dead bodies,” claimed another fourth-year student.
The student had said that shootings of porn videos took place in hospital classrooms, seminar rooms and hostel rooms. They said that authorities knew everything but they didn’t do anything. The miscreants allegedly used photos of faces of female students at the medical college to superimpose on the videos made with prostitutes.
They claimed that when Soumitra’s girlfriend’s photo was also used in this manner, he protested against the gang, and this ultimately led to his death. Reportedly, Soumitra had told his batchmate Auromita Das about the mischief committed by some of the males who, he claimed, had pasted her face from images taken at a birthday celebration onto nude bodies and shared the unpleasant photographs. She then found out that it was done by someone whose advances she had rejected in the past.
She also claimed to have approached the young men and ticked them off, confiding in the heat of the moment that Soumitra had informed her of the existence of the morphed images. Soumitra’s ‘betrayal’, protests, and possible threat to expose the scam, according to a substantial portion of the students, may have contributed to his death.
The allegations were supported by the fact that tripods and reflectors were found in a hostel room, allegedly used to shoot porn videos. While students verified that the room was frequently utilized for shooting, the police did not even bother to search the room during the investigation, even though the tripods and reflectors were still present after the dead body of Soumitra Biswas was discovered in the adjacent room, indicating that shooting by a group continued even after Biswas’ death.
However, no action was taken against the hostel or college administrators for willful negligence. Ironically, there were enough early indicators of foul play. When Biswas’s dead body was discovered, a handkerchief was found shoved in his throat, according to the OC of Chitpur Police Station. Dr. Apurba Bose of the R.G. Kar Medical College also informed the media that the door at the back of the room had been oddly wrenched open. The physicians were equally startled to observe the youngster hanging from the ceiling fan with a very short nylon string. The youth couldn’t have tied the noose around his own neck and then reached for the ceiling fan because the length was too short, they said.
