The car that is suspected to have fatally hit an Aliah University student before fleeing on Sunday was seized on Monday afternoon, police said.
The Toyota car with a damaged front was traced to a service centre off the Ruby crossing, a senior police officer in New Town said.
The officer said they were questioning till late on Monday a man who told the police team that went to the service centre that he had been asked by the owner of the vehicle to drive it to the workshop and get it repaired.
A senior officer of the Bidhannagar commissionerate said late on Monday that three men were being questioned. At least one of them is an official of the company in whose name the car is registered.
Shakil Ahmed, a final-year postgraduate student of geography, died after being hit by a car that was moving at a high speed on a near-empty road near the Aliah University campus in New Town around 4.30pm on Sunday.
Shakil, who had left his hostel on the campus to travel home to Murshidabad, was walking towards the main road in a search of a vehicle to reach the Howrah station, friends said.
Praveen Prakash, deputy commissioner, New Town, Bidhannagar police commissionerate, said on Monday that they had tracked down the car that had hit Shakil to a service station near the Ruby crossing.
The police had been making enquiries about cars matching the make, model and colour of the vehicle that allegedly hit the student with those that landed up at workshops on Monday morning.
A senior officer of the commissionerate said they zeroed in on the vehicle based on inputs from a civic police volunteer who was posted around 200m from the accident spot.
“The civic volunteer had seen a grey Toyota Yaris with its front damaged moving at a high speed. The volunteer was alerted by a radio message after Ahmed’s friends called in for help by dialling 100 after the accident,” the officer said.
Prakash said none of the 70-odd CCTV cameras installed on the stretch of the road in front of Aliah University till the Ecospace intersection was functional for the past week.
“Power supply to the cameras has been turned off because of maintenance work on the sewerage and drainage networks.... Despite this we tracked down the car using footage from other cameras installed at some major intersections in New Town,” the deputy commissioner said.
Prakash said they had identified the person who was at the wheel during the accident.
“We are looking for the person. We are not disclosing the identity of the driver as well as the person who took the car to the service station for the sake of the investigation,” the officer said.
Students of Aliah University held a demonstration outside the campus on Monday afternoon demanding better policing and the setting up of a manned traffic outpost near the institution.
The students demanded the “immediate arrest of the man at the wheel”.
“We often see cars speeding down this stretch and accidents are common here. A few days back, a girl student of the university was seriously injured after being hit by a speeding car,” a protesting student said.
A senior official of New Town Kolkata Development Authority, which maintains the township’s civic infrastructure, said they had asked the agency involved in the maintenance of the sewerage and drainage work to expedite work so that the CCTV cameras can be functional again at the earliest.
