At Vinay Mishra's Rash Behari Avenue apartment, the search went on for almost seven hours.
Two properties of Trinamool Youth Congress general secretary Vinay Mishra in Kolkata were searched by the Central Bureau of Investigation on Thursday in connection with an ongoing probe into a cow smuggling racket in Bengal.
At the Rash Behari Avenue apartment, the search went on for almost seven hours, with the CBI team finally leaving the premises around 3 pm.
Mr Mishra, however, is not traceable and, according to sources, the CBI has issued a lookout notice for him.
Mr Mishra is the first person linked to the Trinamool Congress to be raided by the CBI in the cross-border cattle smuggling racket, believed to involve thousands of crores of rupees.
The BJP has been accusing key Trinamool leaders of being linked to cattle smuggling and coal theft.
The raids come days after Md Enamul Haque, a resident of Bengal's Murshidabad district and the alleged kingpin of the cattle smuggling racket from Bengal to Bangladesh was sent to judicial custody on December 11. He was arrested from Delhi in November.
The CBI had on November 5 carried out searches at five locations in the metropolis in connection with the case in which two Border Security Force (BSF) officials were also arrested.
The CBI on Thursday also searched the homes of two businessmen at Konnagar, on Kolkata's northern fringe, as part of another ongoing probe into the coal theft racket. The alleged kingpin of the racket, one Anup Majhi also known as Lala, is also missing.
The agency's preliminary enquiry had found that cattle smuggling was rampant along the India-Bangladesh border and is allegedly aided by some corrupt officers of the BSF and customs, the Press Trust of India reported.
The CBI has gone full steam on the cases related to West Bengal, which will hold elections next year, with Director RK Shukla especially asking the team probing the Saradha ponzi scam to finish filing all the First Information Reports or FIRs by January 2021, PTI said.