Skulls and bones dug out in nawabs backyard, near jail

Lalbag (Murshidabad), Jan. 31: Before the trauma of tumbling skeletons in Nithari could fade, at least 26 skulls and a heap of bones were found buried next to a pond here today.

The spades and shovels of labourers engaged by the public works department to build a second wall outside the boundary of Lalbag subdivisional jail hit a hard object around 11 am. It turned out to be a human skull with its teeth intact.

As they went on digging, more skeletal remains surfaced. Some of them were brittle to the touch.

The crowd of onlookers swelled as the news spread and police struggled to cope with it.

Murshidabad superintendent of police Rahul Srivastava said the bones found included those of animals.

“We will have them tested by forensic experts. The police and the CID would carry out separate investigations.”

Unlike Nithari, Lalbag, around 200 km from Calcutta, did not see its residents go missing one after the other.

“A team of CID officer has already left from Calcutta,” the district police chief said.

Ten days ago, the PWD took up the job of fortifying the jail. “This morning, the labourers were working on the western end of the pond when they came running to us, said jailer Vinod Kumar Singh.

The digging will resume tomorrow. The police would guard the site through the night. The district PWD has been told to stop work.

All future diggings will be held in front of the CID officers,” said Srivastava.

Not a single skeleton was intact. We have found 26 skulls and a lot of bones from an area measuring 5 ftx8 ft. We don’t know how so many skulls and bones came there,” subdivisional officer Ajay Sannamat said.

It appears that the bones are ancientâ maybe 100-150 years old. One of them was so thick that we doubt whether it belonged to a human being. It could be that of an animal,Sannamat added.

Lalbag is only about half a kilometre from Hazarduari palace, from where the nawabs ruled till the eighteenth century.

Ruins dating back to the period are strewn all over the place.

Srivastava said he has sent for the old land records to find out what that place used to be in those days.