Convict in blogger Bijoy murder arrested in B'luru

NT Correspondent
Bengaluru:

A Bangladeshi national, who had been evading arrest in a murder case for seven years, has been nabbed in the city following a joint effort by Kolkata police along with the South East Division of the City police and their counterparts from Bangladesh, city police said on Friday.

The accused has been identified by the police as Faisal Ahmed. As per the police, the accused was on the run after murdering a writer and a blogger, Ananta Bijoy Das, 33, in Sylhet, Bangladesh. Das, whose writing was critical of Islam and other organised religions, was hacked to death by a group of masked men with machetes, in front of his home in the northeastern city of Sylhet in May 2015.

Ananta Bijoy Das had been writing for Mukto-Mona, a website started by Avijit Roy, the US-based Bangladeshi blogger who himself was hacked to death in Dhaka on February 26, 2015. Awarding a death sentence to the accused in March this year, Judge Nurul Amin Biplob, special counter- terrorism Tribunal in Sylhet, had said that the four convicts were not connected with any Islamist extremist outfit, but he said Das was murdered because of his anti-religious writings, which "angered extremists".

However, the cops stated that the accused has links with the terror outfit Al-Qaeda. Faizal Ahmed had managed to escape from Bangladesh and settled in Bengaluru. While he was here, the Bangladesh court awarded him a death sentence along with three others. "As the police in Bangladesh initiated a search for him after the murder, the accused illegally crossed the border and entered India.

The accused, Faisal, worked as a cab driver in Bengaluru and led a normal life to avoid coming to the notice of the police. However, he was nabbed on July 1 and the incident has come to light lately," sources from Bengaluru police said.

Following a court order, the Bangladesh police collected information on Ahmed hiding in India in June and gave the inputs to the Kolkata police. In turn, Kolkata police had confirmed the accused's presence in Bengaluru.

It was revealed that Faisal had created fake documents to claim that he was an Indian. He had got a passport with a Mizoram (Assam) address. He also had a driving license with a Bengaluru address on it and was working as a cab driver here, police said. Further investigation is taken up by the local police and central intelligence agencies to find out his nexus with local people here.