Sports promoter Satadru Dutta spoke publicly about the issues during Lionel Messi’s GOAT Tour event in Kolkata on Monday. Messi, along with former Barcelona teammate Luis Suarez and former Atletico Madrid player Rodrigo de Paul, left the Salt Lake Stadium within 25 minutes on December 13 after confusion and crowd trouble in the venue. At the time, West Bengal Sports Minister Arup Biswas, who was with Messi during the event, was accused of allowing people into the stadium without registration. Many fans who bought expensive tickets were left unhappy. The situation later turned chaotic, with some fans damaging property inside the stadium. The one-hour ceremony had to be cut short. A few hours later, Satadru was arrested at the Kolkata airport and held for 38 days before being released on January 19. After the recent West Bengal Assembly elections, in which Biswas lost the Tollyganj seat and the All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) lost power, Satadru publicly reacted to the incident. “Just because you lost the election, don’t think you’ve been punished. I’ll file a defamation case, and if necessary go to the Supreme Court. I’ll fight till the end,” he wrote on Facebook stories, as quoted by Sportsstar. He also accused Biswas of ignoring repeated warnings during the event. “Again and again, I asked him not to click pictures here. But, using his power, he continued to click pictures. He will have to pay for it. He (Baswa) is laughing while his own people are barging in. No one heard my agony. The police also stood silent,” he added. Satadru added that he will hold a press conference soon and talk about what happened in detail. “The press conference is coming soon. Everything will come out. You sabotaged my event, you targeted me. You wasted my three years of efforts and perseverance, you disappointed all the fans, you put me in jail for 38 days. Now it’s my turn. They thought silence could bury the truth. When they denied my team access to the ground card, they denied access to the ground card.” You locked them in the room. scare Control Your puppets didn’t just interfere… they blackmailed my event. They sabotaged everything.”
