Five shot dead at a Guwahati hotel: owner and her son among the victims as leaseholder is arrested within the hour

A dispute over a hotel lease ended in five deaths in the heart of Guwahati on the night of 26 October. The shooting happened inside Hotel Bilas Inn, in a narrow lane opposite Bora Service on GS Road, about two kilometres from the Assam Police headquarters, at around 9 pm.

Seven rounds were fired. Four people died where they stood; a fifth died at Gauhati Medical College and Hospital, and a sixth, hit but alive, was reported stable by a senior doctor there. Police Commissioner Partha Sarathi Mahanta, who reached the spot, put it plainly: six persons sustained gunshot wounds, of whom five succumbed.

Who died

The victims were on the owner’s side of the dispute. They include Helena Bharali, who owned the hotel, her son Devarshi Kashyap, Narayan Das, 48, and Satyendra Pathak, 42. Four of the five belonged to one family and the fifth came from their village, the commissioner said; the last body had not been formally identified by the morning of 27 October.

Ghanakanta Gogoi, who had taken the hotel on lease about a year earlier, was arrested in the Paltan Bazar area within an hour of the firing. Police seized a licensed .32-bore pistol and say he fired the shots himself. The preliminary finding, Mahanta said, is that the incident stemmed from a property dispute related to the lease agreement, and that one person was the intended target. He expected the full sequence to be established within a day.

Reaction

The hotel had been in the news about a year earlier, when its owner was arrested in an alleged flesh-trade case. The opposition seized on both that history and the location, a short walk from police headquarters. Gaurav Gogoi, the state Congress president and deputy leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, said the killings raised serious questions about public safety in Guwahati, asked Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, who also holds the home portfolio, to take responsibility, and called for a thorough inquiry and prosecution.

The case is with Paltan Bazar police station.