Sharjah: An Indian expatriate was found dead in his one-bedroom apartment in Al Nahda on Wednesday morning. Concerned colleagues contacted police after their calls to the man went unanswered for several days.
The man, identified as Gautam Bandopadhyay, 53, from Kolkata, had moved into Tiger Building just two months ago and he was said to be living alone.
“His friends couldn’t gather what went wrong. Every time they came to check, they saw his car parked in its usual place and the phone rang whenever they called. However, it stopped ringing a couple of days ago. Only today did they suspect the unimaginable,” a watchman at the building told XPRESS.
The guard who washed Bandopadhyay’s car said something was amiss when he found the vehicle unmoved for days. “He had [probably] fallen from his bed and hurt himself. The blood on his head and the floor had clotted and turned blackish while he lay motionless on the floor. He had some sort of a mask on as well. It looked like an oxygen mask to me, but it had moved to one side of his face,” said a cleaner who had entered the 24th floor unit along with the police on the fateful day.
Bandopadhyay is suspected of having died of a heart attack. “He told me that he had had one [heart attack] recently,” said a neighbour.
“He was diabetic and had high blood pressure. He possibly had heart problems as well,” said a former colleague. Bandopadhyay was the head of finance for a Greek-owned company in Jebel Ali, but quit on August 15 to set up his own consultancy firm.
Pakistani Saifur Rehman, 27, who replaced Bandopadhyay as the new finance manager, said he learnt a lot from him. “He was a nice man.”
He said Bandopadhyay’s mother called him on Tuesday enquiring about her son. Rehman said that Bandopadhyay’s mother was worried she hadn’t spoken to her son for days.
“I don’t have the heart to tell her what happened,” Rehman said.
