BNP leader Salahuddin Ahmed was discovered in India’s Shillong on Monday, two months after he had gone mysteriously missing from Dhaka. But the reappearance of the former underground crisis communicator of the BNP is also wrapped in equal – if not more – mystery.
Around 2:30pm yesterday, Salahuddin’s wife Hasina Ahmed told reporters in a briefing that her husband had called her up around 10am and told her that he was at a mental hospital in Shillong in the Indian state of Meghalaya.
By then though, journalists here had already learned from sources that Salahuddin was alive and called his wife. Hasina, however, did not disclose the matter before meeting BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia around noon.
Several hours before that, the Shillong Times had carried a two-sentence news about the arrest of a 54-year-old Bangladeshi man named Salahuddin Ahmed in the city’s Golf Link area.
At the afternoon press conference, Hasina Ahmed said: “InshaAllah my husband is alive. He is currently undergoing treatment at Mimhens [Meghalaya Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences] Hospital in Shillong.”
She said that they would try to go to Shillong today by getting their visa application processed, which could not be done yesterday.
Hasina got the phone call from her husband when she was bringing home her daughter, who is a student of Scholastica school. She then dropped her daughter home and went straight to Gulshan to meet Khaleda Zia. Sources said Khaleda had also talked to Salahuddin.
A senior official of a state intelligence agency told the Dhaka Tribune last night that Salahuddin had sneaked into India in the last week of April.
Since disappearing from Dhaka’s Uttara on March 10, the BNP leader had been continuously trying to cross over to a neighbouring country. His initial plan was to flee to Nepal, but because of the earthquake, he changed his plan. Then, with the help of a broker from Jokiganj of Sylhet, he sneaked into the Indian state, the official said.
When contacted, Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) spokesperson Monirul Islam, a joint commissioner of the force and chief of its Detective Branch (DB), said that they had got confirmation that the BNP leader is in Meghalaya but refused to say anything more.
The Dhaka Tribune then contacted AKM Shahidul Haque, inspector general of police, who said: “The fact that Salahuddin contacted his family from India proves that none of the law enforcement agencies are involved with his disappearance.”
Police are now trying to find out how Salahuddin went to Meghalaya, the IGP said.
Neither Bangladesh police nor the BNP had said anything officially after news broke that Salahuddin was alive, although they had been blaming each other since the BNP leader disappeared two months ago.
Even on Sunday, a day before Salahuddin was found, the BNP had renewed its allegation that law enforcers had abducted Salahuddin. BNP chief Khaleda Zia spoke at an unscheduled press conference last night but did not say anything about Salahuddin’s reappearance.
Police on the other hand have been saying since the beginning that they had nothing to do with Salahuddin’s disappearance. They said they would have arrested him anyway in violence cases had he been available. They said the same thing to a court in connection with a petition filed by Hasina Ahmed.
However, the BNP leader yesterday told the Indian news agency Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) that he had been kidnapped by a group of unidentified people from Uttara and did not know how he ended up in Shillong.
In an interview with Bangla Tribune’s Delhi correspondent Ranjan Basu, Meghalaya police chief Mariahom Kharkrang yesterday said that when Shillong police found Salahuddin on Monday morning, he was loitering aimlessly near the Golf Link area.
He did not have anything on him – no identity card, no money and not even his purse. He said he was a former minister of Bangladesh but could not produce any proof of citizenship or explain how he got there, Kharkrang said.
Because he was looking devastated and was talking incoherently, local police took him to the Mimhans Hospital. As he showed signs of improvement on Tuesday morning and recollected his wife’s cell phone number, he was allowed to make the phone call back home, the Meghalaya police boss told the Bangla Tribune.
Local police have filed a case against him under the foreigners act, but have not been able to interrogate him further as he was still in the hospital.
“We have kept him under observation. The patient said he had some physical ailments, but we found him to be mentally fit. So, we transferred him to the Shillong Civil Hospital this afternoon [yesterday],” the IANS quoted a Mimhans Hospital official as saying.
Ranjan Basu also reported that Meghalaya police had been consulting with the Indian foreign ministry regarding the next course of action in this regard.