The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) has arrested five suspected members of an organized human trafficking ring that kidnapped women and sold them to broker in India.
CID said the ring trafficked at least 20 women and were arrested from Jessore’s Sharsha upazila on Sunday.
The suspects are Md Shahin, Rafiqul Islam, Biplob Ghosh, Akhtarul, and Md Bablu.
Sheikh Md Rezaul Haider, additional DIG of the Organised Crime Unit of CID, confirmed the arrests in a press briefing at CID’s Malibag office in Dhaka on Monday.
He said they had already arrested ringleader Mohsin Uzzaman Protik, alias Protik Khandaker, alias Babu, from Chittagong.
“We had been monitoring five of Protik’s associates, based on information from his interrogation. We were able to arrest them from the Sharsha area of Jessore on Sunday,” he added.
On November 11 last year, a 14-year-old girl was trapped in a house on the Benapole border and raped after being lured on the pretext of sending her to Malaysia, the CID official said.
Police rescued the victim while she was being trafficked to India. Subsequently, a case was filed for the incident and CID began investigation, he added.
Rezaul said the accused had earlier trafficked another woman to India on the pretext of sending her to Saudi Arabia. She gave a statement in court with the names of several of the presently accused.
The additional DIG said suspect Shaheen, who is a driver, would bring women who were going to be trafficked, out of Dhaka and other areas, by car. The victims were then imprisoned at Rafiqul Islam's house near the Jessore border.
Biplob, another associate of Rafiqul, would then take the women to the Jessore border area from the house. From there, Bablu would smuggle the women to India by boat, the CID official added.
“During interrogation of the accused, we came to know that the gang has trafficked at least 20 women to India so far. They took women to Rafiq's house in the Jessore border area on the pretext of getting them jobs in Malaysia and India. They were later trafficked to the Rajkot area of India,”said Additional DIG Sheikh Md Rezaul Haider.
“According to the victims, they were injected with anesthesia upon being taken away from Dhaka. After being taken to the border area, gang members would torture them.
The hospital report mentions physical abuse of the victims,” he added.