Former top Maoist leader Purnendu Sekhar Mukherjee passed away in Kolkata on Saturday morning.
Mukherjee, a former central committee member of the banned CPI (Maoist), was suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He was 75.
Mukherjee was arrested from Bihar in 2011 along with other central committee members Varanasi Subrahmaniyam, Vijay Kumar Arya and Jagdish Master.
Since being released on bail in 2015, he had shunned his underground life and was living publicly in south Kolkata’s Bansdroni area.
However, the police suspected that he never lost touch with the party.
Mukherjee, who was unmarried, wished to donate his body upon death and they were in touch with government-run hospitals in Kolkata to ensure his body could be donated for medical research purposes.
Mukherjee was one of the first-generation Naxalites who joined the movement in the late 1960s and was part of the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) right from its inception in 1969.
He worked in close coordination with the likes of senior Maoist leaders Sushil Roy (alias Barun da) and Prashanta Bose (alias Kishan da).