"We could not dare keep them in our office any longer, as I have been receiving repeated phone calls asking for their location," BNWLA Rajshahi division chief Advocate Dil Sitara Begum told The Daily Star before boarding a microbus with the woman and her eight-year-old son yesterday morning.

Dil Sitara did not name the callers but said they were influential people.

The local unit of BNWLA took the 36-year-old woman, who suffered rapes allegedly by four BNP adherents in Tanore 17 years ago, and her son in safe custody on Thursday and were scheduled to send them to the association's Dhaka Safe Home today after completing certain formalities.

Dil Sitara said the BNWLA would arrange income-generating training for the woman and schooling for the boy. "They will be kept there until the case is settled or they feel secure enough to return home," she added.

The woman went into hiding a few weeks ago, as the alleged rapists threatened her with death if she did not cancel the move to re-start the rape case after a nine-year gap or settle the matter for money.

The woman accused Mofiz Uddin, now a vice president of Tanore upazila BNP and the chairman of Chanduria union parishad, and his accomplices Omar Ali, Yaad Ali and the then Soronjai UP Chairman Abdul Mozid Mollah of kidnapping and raping her repeatedly in April 1988. She was an 18-year-old orphan then.

Meanwhile, the Rajshahi superintendent of police (SP) yesterday said they had shown Omar and Yaad as arrested under Section 54 of the Criminal Procedure Code, not in the rape case, as documents of the latter were missing.

Police nabbed the two early hours Thursday on a home ministry directive, after The Daily Star had run a report on the 17-year-long woes and injustice on December 13.

The SP said, "But, when they were produced before the magistrate's court [Thursday night], it was referred that they stand accused in the rape case. And so, they will be implicated in the rape case as soon as the documents are found or reproduced."

Senior lawyers yesterday confirmed that the rapists, whoever they might be, could not avoid justice even if the documents remained missing.

The documents have been missing since October 95, when the Supreme Court registry office dispatched those to the special tribunal in Rajshahi that had tried the case. The victim's lawyer blamed the officials at the judicial section at Rajshahi collectorate to have intentionally misplaced the documents to save the rapists.

A local lawyer, Mojibur Rahman Chowdhury, said there should be third or fourth set of copies of them at the police station concerned, in the record room of SP office and with the courts concerned. "The documents would be retrieved according to the third and fourth copies," he explained.

Former public prosecutor Nazrul Islam Sarker said the court also can try the case following the certified copy of the High Court order.

"No-one can avoid justice by simply misplacing documents," he affirmed.