Panic in Christian village as locals, police clash

Panic spread across the Christian-inhabited Doripara village in Gazipur's Kaliganj upazila after the villagers clashed with police centring on a “police raid” there on Friday night.

Locals said four men entered at least two houses in the village around 10:00pm on Friday and demanded money. As the villagers asked for their identity, they forced them to shut up, claiming that they were policemen and were in a raid.

The villagers then shouted that robbers entered the village, prompting some 200 locals to rush in. They wanted to beat the four men, but they took shelter in a room.

“The four men entered a room to hide themselves. Then, villagers contacted Kaliganj Police Station asking if there was any police raid on Doripara village, but police said no,” said villager Meena Dores.

However, in an hour a police team arrived at the spot and said the four men were plainclothes cops. The four, Meena said, searched her house and took Tk 5,000 from her wallet.

Another villager, Bikash Rozario, said the angry people demanded police give a written statement that plainclothes cops would not harass the villagers, but the law enforcers refused to do it.

At one point, police got the four policemen out of the room, and when people shouted, police baton-charged the villagers to disperse them and fired 10 to 12 rounds of rubber bullets, injuring about a dozen villagers, Bikash told The Daily Star.

Contacted, Additional Superintendent of Police of Gazipur Pankaj Dutta, said a team of law enforcers, led by sub-inspector of Kaliganj Police Station Jamil Uddin Rashed, conducted a raid, acting on a tip-off, to seize local liquor.

He claimed that the villagers and police got engaged in a heated exchange and scuffled.

Officer-in-Charge (OC) of the police station, Alam Chand, said a number of people in the village were accused in different cases but police could not arrest them as they were in hiding.

Asked why they conducted the raid at night without ID cards, the OC replied that the four were carrying ID cards but "they were not in a situation to show them".

About the baton-charging and firing, he said they had to do it to rescue the policemen.

Dilip Costa, a local Union Parishad member, said making local liquor was an old tradition in the Christian village, but police used to raid the village often and demanded money on different pretexts.

Talking to The Daily Star last night, he said the villagers were in panic because police might make wholesale arrests and accuse them in false cases.