FOREIGNERS KILLING : Japanese team joining hands in investigation [ Tritiyo Matra News ]

FOREIGNERS KILLING : Japanese team joining hands in investigation

Local October 06, 2015

Investigators on Monday said that two foreigners were killed in Dhaka and Rangpur in less than a week by the same entity but different assailants.
‘In both cases, we have confirmed the foreigners had no personal and professional enemies and both were killed on the same intension,’ said Rapid Action Battalion director intelligence Lieutenant Colonel Abul Kalam Azad, who has been assisting police investigators in both the cases.
He suspected that separate teams with ‘professional hands’ committed the ‘targeted’ killings.
‘But,’ he said, ‘we are still in dark about the motives…Once we get any clues in either of the cases, we will be able to solve both the cases.’
Criminal Investigation Department forensic experts earlier had stated the pattern indicated that ‘professional hands’ were behind the killing of the 65-year-old Japanese national Hoshi Kunio in Rangpur on Saturday, like in the killing of Italian international aid worker Cesera Tavella, who was in charge of a project of a Netherlands-based organisation being implemented in Rangpur, in the capital’s diplomatic enclave in Gulshan on his way home On September 28.
Police investigators in both the cases said they could make no major progress in the investigations.
The investigators in Tavella murder case were having series of meeting and analysing witness accounts.
On Saturday morning, Hoshi Kunio was brought dead to Rangpur Medical College Hospital after he was shot from close distance a few minutes before 10:00am on an alleyway on Rangpur-Haragach road at Alutari.
On Monday, a Japanese team arrived in Bangladesh for the investigation into the murder, a senior police official said without detailing the formation and terms of reference of the team.
Rumi Ariyoshi, the public affairs and culture head at Japan Embassy, on Monday in a statement requested not to trespass the boundary tape line which prohibits anyone other than the law enforcers and officials to enter the murder spot ‘in order to avoid hampering the smooth investigation by the law enforcers.’
New Age correspondent in Rangpur reported that the police said that they had already mapped all possible escapes of assailants and suspected that the assailants used any alleyway to reach their destination after the killing.
Rangpur range’s deputy inspector general of police Humayun Kabir said that the law enforcers had taken all possible measures to identify the killers.
Police filed a case on Saturday with Kaunia police station accusing three unnamed assailants.
The police picked up rickshaw-puller Munnaf Hossain, who drove the victim to the spot, Murad Hossain, who was working around the victim’s farmhouse, his acquaintances Humayun Kabir Hira and his landlord Zakariya Bala for interrogation.
They had been interrogated in police custody since Saturday morning without being produced before any court. Of them, Zakariya was admitted to Rangpur Medical College Hospital.
‘We can keep any person in our custody if they are not arrested in any case,’ said Kaunia police station officer-in-charge Rezaul Karim.
Kaunia police station inspector (investigation) Mamunur Rashid, also the investigation officer of the case, said they seized the rickshaw on which the Japanese was going to his farmland on Saturday morning.
The body was kept in the mortuary of Rangpur Medical College in police protection while the local administration said that the Japanese officials, who had been in Rangpur from Sunday, would return Dhaka with the body.