Forty-five employees of Partex Denim, a major garment manufacturing unit of the Partex Group, have been arrested from their residences during the early hours yesterday for their alleged involvement in a land grabbing case.
Around 2:30am, more than 100 men in police uniform and plain clothes, entered the factory in Gazipur, said Deputy General Manager of Partex Denim, Nizam Uddin.
Later, they broke into the dormitories of the employees of the factory nearby and arrested 45 employees including engineers, security staff and labourers, he said.
The 45 employees of the Partex Group were detained for grabbing a piece of land in the Bangla Bazar area of Gazipur. Akram Hossain, a former Superintendent of Police was the owner of the hundred acres of land in the area, said Joydebpur police station Officer-in-Charge Khandaker Rezaul Hasan.
Partex authorities had claimed that they had bought the land from Akram in 2003, whereas, Akram had died in the year 1997, he said.
Zakaria Hossain, a businessman had filed a complaint against 19 identified and 125 unidentified employees of the Partex Group including its Vice-Chairman Aziz Al Kaiser and Managing Director Shawkat Ali Rasel on Wednesday.
He claimed that the land which the Partex authorities were trying to snatch belonged to him.
When contacted, Estate Officer of Partex Denim Mostafa Al Kamal said the Partex Group had purchased around 27 acres of land from Akram Hossain but one Zakaria Hossain had been claiming that five acres of the land belonged to him.
“We have legal documents of the ownership of the land, but police arrested our employees late into the night, breaking into their dorms,” he said.