Farhad Mazhar's judicial statement doesn't match with the information collected by police.

“The abduction created a big mystery. The statement Farhad Mazhar gave under section 164 [to a magistrate] did not correspond to the CCTV footage, [his mobile phone] call list and material evidence we got during investigation,” Dhaka Metropolitan Police Commissioner Asaduzzaman Mia told reporters yesterday.

Investigators said they haven't come across any information that corroborate Farhad's claim that he was abducted after he came out of his residence in the morning of July 3.

The poet-writer was found in a Dhaka-bound bus in Jessore's Noapara around 11:30pm the same day, around 18 hours after what he says was his abduction.

He gave a judicial statement the next day saying some unknown people forced him into a microbus and blindfolded him minutes after he came out of his Adabor house to buy medicines.

But a former colleague of Farhad in a judicial statement on Monday said he called her five to six times and she also called him two to three times on the day of the incident.

When she asked the writer if he was abducted, he said he was alright, the woman said in her statement.

Meanwhile, several CCTV footage, said to be taken from New Market area in Khulna city, show Farhad walking alone with a white shoulder bag and a bandana on his head.

The footage, said to be of 4:41pm, 5:17pm, 6:23pm and 6:44pm, were circulated by the police. It is not clear in the footage whether he was being watched.

The footage has caused confusions since Farhad's wife Farida Akhter told reporters over an hour before he was "found" that the writer had called her around 7:30pm and asked her to manage ransom money asked by his “abductors”.

Besides, Farhad told police that the abductors gave him a ticket of the bus before releasing him around 7:30pm in Khulna.

Contradicting this claim, Nazmus Sadat Shadi, manager of the bus counter in Khulna, said Farhad bought the ticket himself under the name of Gafur around 4:00pm.

Asaduzzaman yesterday said the inspector general of police AKM Shahidul Hoque would brief reporters on the matter with "concrete information and findings" within a day or two.