Sinha Killing Pradeep sent to jail, 3 villagers taken on remand

A court in Cox’s Bazar sent the Teknaf police station suspended officer-in-charge Pradeep Kumar Das to jail while allowing the Rapid Action Battalion to interrogate three villagers for three days each over the shooting death of major retired Sinha Md Rashed Khan in the district on July 31.

The senior judicial magistrate Tamanna Farah passed the separate orders.

Handcuffed and in helmet and bulletproof jacket, Pradeep was escorted by the RAB personnel to the court premises amid tight security at about 3:45pm.

The officials said that he was unable to speak without  the support of the RAB officials and, at one point, he was about to trip while going up the stairs that lead to the court lockup.

The RAB personnel put him into the lockup and within 15 minutes of the issuance of the court order he was sent to the district prison.

The district prison superintendent Md Mokammel Hossain at about 5:47pm said that the suspect did not make any complaint over his health. ‘If he needed any physician, we would be allowed to call one following the normal procedure,’ he added. 

Md Shaheen Abdur Rahman Chowdhury, the resident medical officer at the 250-bed general hospital in the district, told New Age that they had carried out a medical checkup prior to his court appearance and no marks of injures were found on his body.

‘But,’ he said, ‘We found him mentally shattered.’

The court on the day, in separate hearing, remanded three suspects — Nurul Amin, 21, Nizam Uddin, 42, and Ayas Uddin, 40 — for three days in the RAB custody over the murder case filed by Sinha’s eldest sister Sharmen Shahria Ferdush in Cox’s Bazar on August 5.

The three were named as ‘witnesses’ in the first information report filed by the Teknaf police sub-inspector Nanda Dulal Rakshit, who was also in jail in the case, following the shooting death of the ex-major.

According to the investigators, the three started making phone calls to Liyakat Ali, in-charge of Baharchara Police Investigation Centre, before the shooting death of the retired major.

Liyakat was now in jail after he had surrendered to the court and he was remanded multiple times.

The Teknaf police said that Nurul Amin’s mother Khaleda Begum lodged a complaint that her son and two others — Nizam and Ayas — were picked up on August 17 afternoon by a group of plainclothes people on a microbus after they received a letter from the government-instituted four-member committee to testify regarding their roles during the incident.

Two prime suspects — inspector Liyakat and sub-inspector Nanda Dulal — have made confessions over the killing.

With suspended police officers Liyakat and Nanda, five of the 13 suspects have so far made statements before the court.

News Courtesy: www.newagebd.net