Framing for money

It was 1 o'clock at night on April 25. A team from Pallabi Police Station knocked on the door of Mohammad Wasim, owner of a CD shop at Pallabi. With eyes half-closed he answered the door and was taken aback seeing the policemen. Sub-Inspector Abdur Rahim, who led the team, asked Wasim about the whereabouts of his cousin Dipak. Failing to say, Wasim was asked to go to the police station.

The next day SI Rahim, also the investigation officer (IO) of a robbery case, showed Wasim arrested as a suspect in a robbery case.

Pallabi police also picked up more than a dozen people, including schoolboys, vegetable vendors, garments workers, shopkeepers and a construction worker after three incidents of robbery took place in a span of six days from April 24 at Block B in Pallabi.

Many of them bribed their way out of the 20-hour confinement, paying the police between Tk 1,500 and Tk 4,000 each. Wasim, however, was not allowed to go.

"Wasim was not released as we did not offer the police a bribe," said Wasim's brother-in-law, Rafiqul Islam Khan, a graphics designer at The Daily Janakantha. Khan went on to say that his family was finally forced to pay a bribe to prevent Wasim from being tortured. "Ultimately we had to pay a bribe to stop him from being tortured in remand," Khan said, adding, "Let alone any case, there is not even a general diary (GD) against Wasim in any police station."

Wasim later corroborated the assertion. "Taking me on a one-day remand, SI Rahim forced me to call my family to bring the money or face torture," Wasim told The Daily Star.

"The very first hour into the remand, the IO struck me twice in the back and gave me a cellphone asking me to call my relatives to come with Tk 15,000 by 9:00 the next morning if I wanted to avert getting beaten up on remand," he said.

Wasim's brother-in-law Rafiqul said, "After getting Wasim's call, I went to the police station and gave Tk 4,000 in a yellow envelope to SI Karim through his case writer Millat." He added also gave Tk 1,000 to Millat for "mediation".

SI Abdur Rahim, however, denied the allegation. "I do not even know Rafiqul Islam Khan well. I did not take any money from him," Rahim said.

Told that many others levelled the same allegation against him, SI Rahim said, "After the robbery incident I arrested many and produced them before court. You know people bring allegations of the police taking bribes whenever they are arrested."

Another blanket-arrest victim, Arafat, a secondary school certificate (SSC) exams candidate from Tejgaon Vocational Institute, said the police picked him up along with two of his friends, Jahangir Alam and Shahidul Islam, on April 26 soon after they had come out of a local restaurant at about 6:30pm.

"After forcing us to stay overnight in the lockup of the police station, the police released us after our guardians bribed SI Rahim Tk 2,000 for each of us," Arafat told The Daily Star.

Rahim denied this allegation, too.

Among the victims, a poor vegetable vendor, who is the lone breadwinner of his four-member family, had to borrow Tk 1,500 to pay an officer of the police station for release. He is still trying to offset the deficit caused by the unforeseen expense.

The vendor, who preferred to remain unnamed fearing police backlash, said, "The police picked up another fellow vegetable vendor and me at about 7:00pm on May 7 from Block C when we had gone there to collect money from houses where we supplied vegetables in the morning."

"A police van stopped near us and soon some policemen got down and asked us to get into the van. They struck us twice in the back with a stick," he said.

After 20 hours in the lockup, a relative of one of the vendors paid a policeman Tk 3,000 for each to secure their release.

Commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police, SM Mizanur Rahman, said they usually do not get allegations of police intimidating and arresting innocent people for bribes. "If we get any such allegation, we'll investigate and take punitive action if any policeman are found guilty," he told The Daily Star yesterday.