Shamim Mirdha and Sadhin lured their friend Abul Kalam into the capital's Botanical Garden for a hangout on April 13 around 8:00pm. A little later, two more youths joined them.

The three friends took marijuana and started playing with a ball made of waste paper. Sadhin suddenly threw the ball in a nearby pond and asked Kalam to collect it.

As Kalam, a 21-year-old lathe machine worker, swam in the pond to bring the ball, Sadhin along with the three others jumped into the water body and hacked Kalam with a machete, leaving him dead. They dumped the body in a bush of the garden and returned home.

The following day, they went back to the garden, put the body in a sack and carried it to Shamim's Mirpur home in a rickshaw-van. They buried the body under the floor so that no one could trace it.

Police said Shamim, also a lathe machine worker, and Sadhin, a welding worker, planned to kill Kalam over money as well as a relationship with a girl.

The killing of Kalam came to light only on Thursday after the Detective Branch (DB) of Dhaka Metropolitan Police picked up Sadhin from the capital's Mirpur and Shamim from Patuakhali. The DB yesterday showed the two arrested in an abduction case, filed by Kalam's family with Rupnagar Police Station.

Police said the victim's elder brother Abu Bashar had filed a general diary with Rupnagar Police Station on April 15 about Kalam's going missing. As Rupnagar police failed to report his brother's whereabouts, Bashar contacted top police officials and the GD was turned into an abduction case.

The case was transferred to the DB around three months ago.

Requesting anonymity, a senior DB official said they found that Shamim had been staying outside the capital since Kalam went missing and he was using the victim's phone set.

“With the lead, we started probing the incident and revealed the mystery,” he said.

During primary interrogation, Shamim, 20, and Sadhin, 24, told law enforcers that they were friends of Kalam for last eight years. Sadhin had borrowed Tk 50,000 from Kalam early this year and they were in a dispute over returning the money.

On the other hand, Shamim liked a girl with whom Kalam had a relationship.

For these reasons, both Sadhin and Shamim planned to kill Kalam and hired two attackers for Tk 5,000 each. As part of the plan, the two friends took Kalam to the Botanical Garden and killed him, according to investigators.

“We are conducting drives to arrest the two attackers,” Sahadat Hossain, assistant commissioner of the DB, told The Daily Star.

The DB yesterday exhumed the remains of Kalam's body from Shamim's house and sent those to Dhaka Medical College morgue for an autopsy and collecting DNA samples.

Law enforcers said they would produce the two arrestees before a Dhaka court today.