Lawyers representing the wife of Salah Uddin Ahmed, a joint–secretary general of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, will ask the High Court to add the Detective Branch as a respondent to its habeas corpus petition which is currently before the bench of Justices Quamrul Islam Siddiqui and Gobinda Chandra Tagore.
On Monday, the bench had adjourned the case until 8 April due to court holidays and the travel plans of Moudud Ahmed, the main lawyer representing the BNP leader’s wife.
‘According to reports published by the media, Salah Uddin was picked up by Detective Branch, but the DB did not submit a report to the court,’ Moudud Ahmed told New Age. ‘We will raise it at the next hearing, and make a submission and the DB submit a report to the court.’
The lawyer was referring to reports published in various newspapers in which Akhter Ali, a caretaker of the Uttara building where Salah Uddin Ahmed is said to have stayed for a few days until he disappeared on the night of March 10, is quoted to have claimed that on that night plainclothes men, who showed their detective branch identification and forcibly picked up a man from the building.
The government and law enforcement agencies have categorically denied any involvement in the incident, and the officer-in-charge of Uttara West police station claims that Akhter Ali, in his statement to him, did not blame law enforcers for the incident.
In its original legal application, brought to the attention of the court on March 12, two days after Salah Uddin was allegedly picked up, his wife’s lawyers had included as respondents the Rapid Action Battalion, the Criminal Investigation Department, Special Branch and the commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police.
On the same day, the High Court passed an order directing these respondents to ‘show cause why they should not be directed to bring up the husband of the petitioner, namely Salah Uddin Ahmed, before this court.’ The respondents were given until Sunday, March 15, to reply.
On Sunday, Mahbubey Alam, the Attorney General, read out in court relevant police documents and correspondence, which he subsequently placed before the court as an affidavit.
These showed that on March 13 the legal officer of the police headquarters sent a letter to SB, CID, RAB and the DMP asking them to ‘take necessary action’ in relation to the court order. ‘We are requesting you to submit a report about whether or not you have Hasina Ahmed’s husband Salah Uddin in police custody,’ the letter said.
In response, the director of operations of RAB, said that the BNP leader ‘has not been taken by RAB,’ a special police superintendent of SB wrote that Salah Uddin ‘has not been taken under the custody of special branch of police’ and
the additional inspector general of police (CID) also said that the BNP joint secretary general ‘has not been taken under the custody of CID’.
However, the documents submitted by the Attorney General did not include a submission from the DMP commissioner, which has responsibility for the Detective Branch, that included a similar denial.
Since the Detective Branch was not named as a respondent in the habeas corpus application, it was not required to send a separate response to the court.
Deputy police commissioner Masudur Rahman told New Age, ‘The Detective Branch was not involved in any way in the pick-up of Salauddin Ahmed. The Detective Branch comes within the DMP, so what it says includes the Detective Branch.’
Source: New Age
