DB chief sounding satisfied with investigation so far into MP Anar’s murder

Staff Correspondent: Two individuals believed to be directly involved in the sensational murder of three-time MP from Jhenaidah-4 Anwarul Azim Anar, remain outside the custody of the Detective Branch of Dhaka Met Police, according to DMP additional commissioner Harun-or-Rashid, also the DB chief.
“So far we have arrested nine people in connection with the incident, and two are still in India,” Harun said, during a press briefing on Saturday at the DB office.

The chief detective pointed out that police are not summoning and harassing anyone unnecessarily. “But no one involved in the murder will be spared,” he added. DB was able to apprehend the perpetrators who happened to be in Bangladesh quickly, Harun contended. Awami League MP Anwarul Azim Anar departed from Bangladesh by road on May 11, entering India through the Darshana border (connecting Bangladesh’s Khulna with India’s Nadia) on May 12, and started staying with a friend, Gopal Biswas, a gold trader, in the Baranagar area.

Around 1:40pm on May 13, he left Biswas’s house in a cab, on the pretext of an appointment with a neurologist at a Kolkata hospital. The taxi driver who drove Anar around told the Kolkata police they had picked up another Bangladeshi national from the New Market area and then proceeded to a flat in New Town. The medical appointment, if there had been one in the first place, was not kept. CCTV footage revealed that apart from Anar, two men and a woman entered the flat at Sanjeeva Gardens, an upmarket development in Rajarhat. Over the next four days, CCTV footage shows the other three leaving the building at different times, but there is no further sighting of the MP.

It is believed he was killed on the very first day he entered the flat at Sanjeeva Gardens. Some human remains were found in the septic tank of the apartment, but it hasn’t been possible to verify these were the slain MP’s through any DNA-matching with members of his family. A case was filed on May 22 with the capital’s Sher-e-Bangla Nagar Police following a complaint lodged by the victim’s daughter Mumtarin Ferdous Dorin.

Although DB chief Harun has spun various theories in the media at different times on who was behind the murder and why, nothing with regard to these important questions has been satisfactorily answered.
Harun has from the start pointed to the hand of the MP’s friend from his adolescent days in Jhenaidah, businessman Md Akhtaruzzaman alias Shaheen, who is a US citizen. The Kolkata flat where the murder too place was being rented by him from an Indian IAS officer, but Shaheen himself was not present in Kolkata when it happened.

The DB chief has speculated the possible reasons to be ranging from ideological differences to a business deal gone wrong. More recently the MP’s daughter has stated her belief that the reason behind her father’s murder was ultimately political – more specifically frictions within the Jhenaidah unit of ruling party Awami League.