One of the six persons accused in the alleged grisly murder of Bangladesh Awami League MP Anwarul Azim Anar in Kolkata last month earned his living as a paint and whitewash worker in his village in Khulna district, inquiries by Northeast News have revealed.
This accused person, identified by the West Bengal Criminal Investigation Department (CID) as 24-year-old Jihad Howladar, was arrested for his involvement in the murder which allegedly took place in a New Town apartment in Kolkata on May 13.
Bangladesh’s Detective Branch Additional Commissioner, Mohammad Harun-ur Rashid had declared during his recent Kolkata visit that Howladar was a butcher living as an illegal migrant in Mumbai.
He was supposedly hired by the prime accused Akhtaruzzaman Shaheen for Taka 5,000 and recruited to skin, debone and dispose off the flesh and bone pieces in Kolkata.
Rashid, along with other DB officers today reached Kathmandu where the authorities arrested another person accused as a conspirator in Anar’s alleged murder.
This person has been identified as Mohammad Siyam Hossain of Bhola district in Bangladesh. He was arrested in Kathmandu nternational Airport.
It is reliably learnt that the Nepalese police have refused to hand over Siyam Hossain to the Bangladesh Detective Branch. Nepal police sources said they insist that they would hand over Hossain to the West Bengal CID instead.
Even as inconsistencies in the “police narrative” continue to dog the CID and DB sleuths, multiple Awami League district level office bearers and workers who Northeast News spoke with today over phone, said that Howladar is a resident of Barakpur village in Khulna.
In fact, Awami League workers from Kaliganj (Jhenaidah-4 parliamentary constituency) today held a press meet and placed a nine-point questionnaire before the police, demanding “clarity” on several key aspects of the investigation which they claimed was “riddled with holes” and “therefore not satisfactory”. A copy of the questionnaire is available with Northeast News.
One of the main questions relates to Howladar. The local level Awami League workers sought to know whether Howladar was at all a Bangladeshi migrant living in Mumbai illegally.
They demanded that the Bangladeshi authorities provide the name and address of the butcher shop in Mumbai where he was said to work before he was hired by Shaheen to be part of the murder conspiracy. “We demand that the name of the owner of the butcher shop me made public,” Kaliganj Upazila Chairman Jahangir Siddiqui said.
Soon after Howladar was arrested in Kolkata, the CID had merely named Thane, near Mumbai, where he lived. No address or shop name was provided in the remand documents placed before the court to seek Howladar’s police custody.
What is intriguing is the long presence of Siyam Hossain in Nepal nearly two weeks after Anar’s alleged murder was detected. It has emerged that Hossain left Kolkata on May 19 – two days before the murder was detected – to reach Nepal. It is suspected that Siyam Hossain went by road from Kolkata to Nepal.
Northeast News has reliably learnt that Shaheen met up with Siyam – most likely in Kathmandu – before taking a flight to Dubai and onward to New York where he lives with his wife and two grown-up children. Shaheen is said to have flown from Dhaka to Delhi (on May 20) from where he took a flight to Kathmandu and subsequently met Hossain there. Shaheen is said to have taken a Fly Dubai flight to the Gulf emirate.
Raising doubts about the DB and CID investigations so far, Kaliganj Mayor Ashraful Alam told Northeast News over phone that “if Shimul Bhuiyan alias Amanullah was a dreaded killer, he should have been in jail long ago”.
Pointing out that Anar had visited Kolkata “when the Eid roza was on (in April this year) for consultations with a doctor” there, Alam said the Kaliganj MP had left for Dhaka on May 8 evening for party-related work.
“We didn’t speak after his return from Dhaka, but on May 12 a crowd of party workers had gathered at his Kaliganj residence when he was about to leave for Darshana border,” Alam said.
The Kaliganj mayor claimed that he “saw Shaheen sometime before April 30 at Anar’s office” in Kaliganj. “I found him standing on the stairs with two or other persons. He asked me how I was doing and that he would shortly be closeted with Anar in the MP’s third floor office chamber,” Alam recalled.
The demand list released by the Kaliganj Awami League made some pointed queries. It demanded that the investigators produce Anar’s passport, watch, rings, eyeglasses and other personal effects, including his clothings.
Also, the local leaders demanded that the police make public the last recorded locations on the two SIM cards used by Anar. Besides, they wanted the immediate recovery of the sharp-edged blades that were used to dismember, chop and cut up Anar’s body.
