Sand traders, not mob, killed them
The six students were already dead when the villagers found them.
A crime gang killed the youths near the Aminbazar bridge, took the bodies more than half a kilometre away at Keblarchar on the advice of police and called the villagers, saying they had caught robbers.
The mob started beating the six, without knowing the ill-fated youths had already gone beyond all pain.
This was how the murder that took place on July 18 last year became known as an incident of mob beating.
Abdul Malek, who filed a robbery case against the students, and his associate Hamid confessed to the killing before a Dhaka court yesterday. It could not be known if they said anything about the motive.
Senior Judicial Magistrate Tayebul Hasan recorded the statements of the two in the afternoon.
The Criminal Investigation Department arrested Malek and Hamid, both sand traders, from the capital's Mirpur on March 19. At the end of their three-day remand, the two were also placed on another four-day remand on Saturday.
Abdullah Al Mahmud, special superintendent of Dhaka CID, told The Daily Star that Malek and Hamid made the confessions under Section 164 of the Criminal Procedure Code on the first day of the second-phase remand.
According to sources, Malek and Hamid admitted that they along with 20-25 others beat the students to death and injured another. They also named many of those who took part in the killing.
The gang members first killed two students in Baradeshi village, around a quarter kilometre off Keblarchar. Then they beat five others on the eastern side of the Aminbazar truck terminal, leaving four of them dead and another injured, sources quoted the two as saying.
Malek and Hamid claimed the six were drunk then.
They dragged the six bodies and injured Al-Amin to Keblarchar as per advice of the policemen, who went there before the villagers.
Malek also mentioned that he filed the false robbery case as Savar Police Station officer-in-charge Mahbubur Rahman had forced him to do so.
Talking to The Daily Star last night, Al Amin said none of them went to Keblarchar. “Being tortured, I lost my senses. But, so far as I recall, none of us went to Keblarchar. We came under attack near the Aminbazar sand depots.”
After the killing of the students, Malek filed a robbery case while Savar police filed a murder case against 500 to 600 unnamed people of Baradeshi village.
After the incident, a one-member judicial probe body in its report determined that the students were innocent and some Savar policemen were “involved in the killing”.
Following the report, eight policemen were suspended over their alleged involvement in the killing and negligence of duty.
The six students are: Tipu Sultan of Tejgaon College, Towhidur Rahman Palash, Kamruzzaman Kanto and Ibrahim Khalil of Mirpur Bangla College, Shams Rahim Shamam of Maple Leaf International School and Sitaf Jabi Munif of Bangladesh University of Business and Technology.
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