The Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) and its constituent Detective Branch, investigating the murder of a young radical political activist in the Bangladesh capital on December 12, has found no evidence of the presence of at least one of the alleged killers in Dubai.
Speaking to Northeast News over phone, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Media) Talebur Rahman said, “Investigations have found that Faisal Karim Masud, alias Daud Khan, who fired the fatal shot at Osman Goni, alias Sharif Osman Hadi, on December 12, visited Singapore on one occasion in the last six years”.
Asked about two self-shot videos that Masud released on Facebook on December 30 and 31, claiming his presence in Dubai, Rahman said that the police “has no information that he is in that UAE city”. In fact, the Rahman disputed Masud’s claim, revealing that his “passport was cancelled soon after it was detected that he had fired the shot that grievously injured Hadi who later died on December 19 in a Singapore hospital”.
While these inquiry findings complicate the case manifold, more puzzling questions have come to the fore. Did Masud not cross the India-Bangladesh border at Haluaghat in Myemensing on December 13 as previously claimed? Does this negate the police’s claim that Masud entered India with the help of a few Bangladeshi nationals?
In the video that Masud released on Facebook today, he claimed that he was in Dubai. But he neither provided any date of arrival in that city nor the location of the place from where he took the flight. Besides, he was not prepared to disclose the whereabouts of his “friend” Alamgir Hossein who drove the motorcycle on which he rode pillion on December 12.
In the same video, Masud showed viewers a digital copy of the visa issued to him by the United Arab Emirate embassy. A copy of the “Entry Permit – Multi L. Term Entry Permit” issued on December 15, 2022, was issued to Faisal Karim Masud Humayun Kabir (born on March 22, 1990) who at that time held an ordinary Bangladeshi passport (No. B00234042).
The police is now not able to say with any certainty that Masud entered India, even though some investigators continue to cling on to flimsy and unverified “informal information” related to this. The available circumstantial evidence and other facts point to Masud’s presence in Bangladesh where he may have been lodged in a “safe house” from where he has full freedom to post videos on social media.
In the first video, Masud is shown wearing a hooded, brown sweatshirt, while in the second video he is shown covered by a used blanket. He did not pan his phone camera to show the neighbourhood where he took shelter in Dubai.
He did not provide details of how he managed to board a flight – from an as yet unknown airport – for Dubai, how he managed to evade the police net and the immigration authorities at the airport. More importantly, if the DMP’s claim that his passport had been cancelled is true, he could not have used it to clear security and immigration authorities at the departure airport.
