Friends and neighbours have differing views

KOLKATA: The locality of Bimannagar has sprung up in a corner of Rajarhat, not too far from Dum Dum airport, only over the past decade and a half. In its lanes and bylanes, Hindus and Muslims have so far lived next to each other peacefully, in prosperous homes. But things are different now with the news of local lad Mehdi Masroor Biswas’s arrest.
Tension is palpable, and with investigating agencies frequenting the area, every outsider is treated with suspicion.Not only have the cops questioned Biswas’s parents — who have been living in the locality for 10 years — neighbours said they too were not spared the “shame of being terror suspects”. “Leave us alone. Entire Bimannagar is being treated as a hub for breeding terrorists,” was the refrain.
The Biswas family has already left the city. The entrance to their three-storied house was found locked on Monday. Tenants who live on the ground floor looked nervous and vouched that the quiet, well mannered boy had not given away any signs of possessing any radical views.
“I cannot imagine that the house that I have rented (55/42) is in national news for being a terrorist’s home,” said Anish Ahmed, the tenant. “I met Mehdi when he was here during his vacations, but cannot imagine the quiet boy spreading the message of terror worldwide,” said 60-year-old Ahmed.
Neighbour Binod Daw, a close friend of the Biswas family who has been living in Bimannagar for 17 years, said he has known Biswas since he was a schoolboy. “He was a bright boy at the local Indira Gandhi Memorial School. Later he went to Guru Nanak College for his engineering studies. He is just like any other youth of today, active on the internet. But to think that he used it to network for terrorists is impossible. There must have been a mistake,” felt Daw.
Some senior residents claimed that Biswas could not even read Arabic, leave alone translate it. “Let them ask me and I will prove to them that Masroor did not know the Arif of Arabic,” said Hafizur Rahman, who has known the family ever since they relocated here from Kolaghat.
However, Biswas’s friends in college and on Facebook contested some of these claims. “Masroor had a quiet exterior, but possessed radical religious views that he publicly proclaimed on Facebook. All his friends were aware of this,” said a friend whose house he frequented. “Girls starts avoiding him because of his dogmatic approach and he lost some of his closest friends,” claimed another college friend. “We realised something was wrong when he deactivated his Facebook account,” said another friend.