A human trafficker was killed in a gunfight with police in Cox’s Bazar yesterday, and three were arrested by the Criminal Investigation Department in Chittagong on Monday.
The deceased, Belal Ahmed, 30, was one of the listed human traffickers at the Home Ministry, sources at Cox’s Bazar police said.
The gunfight took place in Cox’s Bazar’s Eidgaon area; police raided the area after receiving a tip-off about human trafficking, said Bakhtiar Uddin Chowdhury, OC at Cox’s Bazar Sadar Model police station.
When police arrived at the scene, the traffickers reportedly opened fire and police retaliated, forcing the traffickers to retreat and flee.
Later, police found Belal’s bullet-hit body along with some ammunition.
Two police members were injured in the gunfight, but they are currently out of danger, the OC said.
Including Belal, five traffickers have now been killed in gunfights with police in the past one week.
In Chittagong, a CID team arresterd three human traffickers in the NDC Tower in Halishahar. Materials recovered by the team included 33 passports, forged Libyan visas, fake stamps and documents of different countries.
Following a tip-off, the team raided the building and found the traffickers – Ali Akbar, Bahar Uddin and Shah Baizid Ullah, all from Feni, said Mohammad Moslem, Chittagong divisional special superintendent of police at the CID, during a press briefing at his office.
The three were handed over to Halishahar police station on Monday night, and CID Inspector Kajol Kanti Chowdhury filed a case against them with the police station under the Human Trafficking Prevention and Control Act.
During primary interrogation, the traffickers said they had been involved with human trafficking for a month and had trafficked 1,000 Bangladeshis to Libya. Their racket involved both local and expatriate members.
They mainly targeted poor, illiterate and unemployed people, especially in the northern parts of the country, and charged each client Tk2 lakh to Tk5 lakh in fees, Moslem said.