Police last night conducted a fruitless drive in several remote shoals in the river Brahmaputra in Gaibandha in search of missing BNP leader Salahuddin Ahmed.
Personnel from Gaibandha district police ended the drive around 11:55pm yesterday.
“We have not found anything alive or dead in the shoals that may resemble Salahuddin. Now we are returning,” Mosharraf Hossain, additional superintendent of Gaibandha Police, told the Dhaka Tribune.
“Earlier, we heard a rumour that Salahuddin could be there. But it was just a rumour. No arrests have been made either,” he said.
Joynal Abedin, chairman of the local union council, told the Dhaka Tribune that he first heard about the rumour from the officer-in-charge of the local police station and the local upazila executive officer (UNO).
By the time teams from the district police arrived in the area, some of his men had already started the search.
Meanwhile, BNP Joint Secretary General Salahuddin’s wife Hasina Ahmed sought Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s intervention to trace her husband who had been missing for the last nine days.
Hasina Ahmed, also a former BNP lawmaker, handed over a memorandum to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) around 11:25am yesterday.
Hasina Ahmed told reporters: “I came to the PM to seek her help to find out my husband. I believe she will understand my agony as she too is a mother and a wife.”
The three-page memorandum said: “I beg your intervention and special instruction to find my husband.
“If my husband did anything wrong and if there is any police case against him then he should be brought to the court through legal procedure.”
In the memorandum she urged the prime minister to give an appointment to her despite the PM’s busy schedule.
Immediately after the submission of the memorandum she fell sick and was driven home.
Salahuddin was allegedly picked up on March 10 from a house in Uttara by some people who identified themselves as detectives.
Until then, Salahuddin had been issuing press statements on behalf of the party from the hideout since the arrest of another Joint Secretary General Ruhul Kabir Rizvi.
Former bureaucrat Salahuddin left government job to join the BNP and became a lawmaker from a Cox’s Bazar constituency.
He also served as the state minister for communications in a BNP government.