Jewel isn't dead
The man who according to the Rapid Action Battalion blew himself up at its camp in the capital's Ashkona is not Jewel Rana Olive of Faridpur's Bhanga as reported by some newspapers.
On Friday, a suspected suicide bomber sneaked into a Rab barrack and detonated his vest, killing himself, the force claimed.
From the blast scene, law enforcers collected fingerprints from two fingers that were damaged by splinters and sent them to the respective wing of the Election Commission for identification of the bomber.
But Brig Gen Mohammad Shaidul Islam, director general of National Identity (NID) Registration Wing of the EC which has the database of the fingerprints of voters, said the sample had too many splinter marks and were insufficient for a complete identification.
The sample, however, slightly matched with that of another man's fingerprints stored in the database.
Based on that information, Rab members picked up Jewel's parents and five other family members from their village home in Faridpur for interrogation, said Rab sources.
Following the incident, several media outlets reported that the “suicide bomber” could be Jewel.
Later, Rab men went to Jewel's home in Dohar in Dhaka district and talked to his wife, who told the force that Jewel was alive. The law enforcers then talked to Jewel by phone and asked him to meet them.
Jewel, however, switched of his phone, prompting the Rab to launch a hunt for him, said the Rab sources.
On Monday, Jewel suddenly turned himself before some media outlets in the capital, saying he did not go to the Rab feeling insecure by the turn of events.
“I want security. They [Rab] have made me a dead person but I want to live,” he said nervously while talking to a private TV station, adding that he kept his phone switched off out of fear. “I am completely innocent.”
Asked, Rab's legal and media wing director Mufti Mahmud Khan yesterday said the fingerprints collected from the blast scene had matched with the samples of Jewel's fingerprints.
Talking to this newspaper, Brig Gen Mohammad Shaidul Islam said, “No one said the fingerprints matched fully.”
He said they did not get all the samples for the complete identification of any person. “We can be sure about the identification of a person after matching all the 10 fingers and the iris of the eye.
“But we only got six percent of the total image of the first fingerprint. The condition of the other one was slightly better.”
Asked, Shaidul said as they had an agreement with Rab to help identify militants, they gave the information to the law enforcers.
He also said it was “next to impossible” to misuse fingerprints stored in the “secured” EC database in case any NID card was lost.
Jewel, who works at a hospital in Munshiganj, said he lost his NID while travelling in Jatrabari area five to six years ago. He tried to file a general diary (GD), but the local police did not register it as he had collected the card from Faridpur.
“I did not give any importance to the matter. I used to do all my work using my passports,” he said.
He said on Friday he learnt that Rab officials picked up his parents along with other family members from their village home and took them to the Rab office in Faridpur.
The next day, he went to his Dohar home from Munshiganj and came to know from his wife that some Rab men were looking for him. As asked, he called the Rab and said he was not the suicide bomber. However, the law enforcers did not “believe him and asked him to meet them”.
Intimidated, he turned off his phone instead, he claimed.
Meanwhile, Jewel's father Alamgir said he along with his wife was also taken to the Rab-1 headquarters in Dhaka where they were shown photographs of Jewel and another youth.
“We recognised our son from the photo but could not identify the other youth,” he said, adding that
Rab men also collected their DNA samples.
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