What: Four houses built illegally on government land. Suspected to be part of a colony being built by some suspects in the Burdwan blast case

Where: Muluk village, 3km from Santiniketan, in Bolpur, and 29km from President Pranab Mukherjee’s ancestral home

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) probing the Burdwan blast is looking at the cluster of houses because all of them are interconnected by holes in the walls. The occupants can move from one house to the other — as in vestibule-linked trains — without stepping out or being noticed by outsiders.

“Each house has a hole in a wall through which one can enter the next house or its courtyard. All the outer walls have loosely knit bricks that can be easily removed. We have never seen such construction before,” an investigator said

The NIA suspects the houses belong to Mithu Sheikh, Talehar Sheikh, Abdul Malek and Dalim Sheikh. In an account in The Telegraph by a Shimulia madarsa student on Wednesday, the girl had mentioned Dalim as the person who had persuaded her father to send her to the institute, suspected of indoctrinating trainees.

No one. All four have been absconding since the October 2 blast in Burdwan, 67km from the four houses. The NIA found books in Arabic, a laptop, computer parts and printers in the houses. Two cellphones were found in a well in front of one of the houses

Eight others had been staying in the houses for the past few months. All 12 claimed to be hawkers of honey, mosquito nets, clothes and utensils. The villagers said the occupants used to leave by 8am and return around noon. “They never spoke to anybody in the village and were mostly seen together,” a villager said

Yes, the irrigation department’s. NIA sources said seven other houses were also coming up on the vested land. “They were setting up a colony and the district authorities took no action against them,” an NIA officer said

Local Trinamul panchayat samiti member Prashanta Mukherjee said: “I called six of those building the houses to my office. They requested me to allow construction. Asked to produce documents such as voter I-cards, they could not. They said they had come from Murshidabad and their documents had been washed away in a flood.

“I did not entertain their application for permission to finish constructing the houses. I did not suspect that they could be involved with a terror module.”

Asked why no action had been taken against the illegal construction, he did not reply.

Sources said the four inter-connected houses had come up around two years ago. Trinamul gram panchayat member Tirtha Kumar Kaibartya said: “Construction of the four houses began when the Left was in charge of the (Sian-Muluk) panchayat. We took over last year and since then, they have merely finished building the houses.”

Snehamoy Chakraborty