A shooting at Hotel Bilas Inn on Guwahati’s GS Road reportedly left five people dead and another injured, with police arresting Ghanakanta Gogoi within an hour and examining a suspected dispute over the hotel’s lease. The supplied report places the incident at about 9pm on Tuesday, but its publication timestamp is later than the intake timestamp, so the event chronology requires confirmation.
According to Guwahati Police Commissioner Partha Sarathi Mahanta, Gogoi was apprehended and a licensed .32-bore pistol was seized from his possession. Police suspect the weapon was used in the killings. Mahanta said the preliminary inquiry indicated a dispute between the hotel owners and Gogoi, who had taken the property on lease the previous year.
Police have not released the identities of the five people who died. Mahanta said four of the deceased were members of the hotel owners’ family, while the fifth victim and the injured person were from the owners’ village. The report identified the injured person as Satyen Pathak, 42, who was being treated at Guwahati Medical College Hospital for a bullet injury to his shoulder.
The incident took place at a hotel on GS Road, one of Guwahati’s busiest arterial corridors. The location places the case within a dense urban environment where commercial properties, residences and high-volume traffic corridors operate in close proximity. Police said six people were shot, five of whom died.
A forensic and scientific investigation was under way, with specialised teams examining the crime scene and collecting evidence. Investigators were also working to establish the complete sequence of events and the precise circumstances that led to the shooting. Mahanta cautioned that the initial findings would need to be verified before definitive conclusions were drawn.
The report places the suspected motive within a property and lease dispute rather than identifying the incident as a militant attack. It also recalls earlier episodes of violence in Guwahati, including the serial blasts of 30 October 2008, which killed more than 55 people in the city and injured over 160, and attacks attributed to the United Liberation Front of Asom in January 2007 that killed 62 people, mostly Hindi-speaking migrant workers. Those incidents form part of the city’s security history but do not establish a connection with the hotel shooting.
The immediate official steps are the forensic examination of the hotel, medical treatment of the injured survivor, questioning of the arrested suspect and further investigation into the lease arrangement and the sequence of the shootings. The reported timing and central incident details should be confirmed against police records or an official statement before publication is treated as fully verified.
