BNP leader Salahuddin Ahmed’s wife Hasina Ahmed has sought the government’s help in bringing her husband back from India where he was found on Monday, two months after going missing from Dhaka.
Meanwhile, State Minister for Home Affairs Asauduzzaman Khan has claimed that the resurfacing of Salahuddin has proved that nobody had kidnapped him and he had been hiding in India.
“Nothing is possible without the government’s cooperation. We submitted visa applications this morning. Our folks are maintaining regular contact with the Indian High Commission. I will start for Shillong soon after getting a visa,” Hasina Ahmed said in a press briefing at her Gulshan residence yesterday.
On Tuesday afternoon, she announced at a press conference that her husband had telephoned her in the morning from a hospital in Shillong in the Indian state of Meghalaya.
Salahuddin, a former state minister of a BNP government, went missing from Dhaka on March 10. His family had since been alleging that he had been abducted by lawmen, who have always denied the claim. When the BNP leader went missing, he was acting as the spokesperson of the party from underground.
Asked whether she had talked to her husband yesterday, Hasina Ahmed, a former lawmaker herself, said that she could not because Salahuddin is now staying at a different hospital.
Local police in Shillong took the BNP leader to a mental hospital because he was acting weirdly when they had found him on Monday morning in the city. Later, he was transferred to a civil hospital as she showed signs of improvement.
However, Asaduzzaman Ripon, BNP’s current spokesperson, told reporters at a briefing at their Nayapaltan office that the party would not say anything in this regard because Salahuddin’s wife had been talking to the media.
The BNP has also been alleging since the beginning that law enforcers in plainclothes had picked up Salahuddin. The BNP leader yesterday also told the Indian media that he was kidnapped by people he did not know and had no idea how he ended up in Shillong, an Indian hill station on the Bangladesh border.
Junior home minister Kamal yesterday said at a programme in Dhaka that Kamal had been changing his location continuously over the last few months.
“We are yet to get any formal documents. So far we have got only word-of-mouth information. Once our Foreign Ministry gets documents, we will start the process of bringing him back ... There are also legal issues with the Indian government,” Kamal said.
Meanwhile, ruling Awami League’s advisory council member Suranjit Sengupta said in a programme in Dhaka yesterday: “BNP chief Khaleda Zia wanted to carry out large-scale firebomb attacks using the issue of Salahuddin’s disappearance when it was she herself who sent him into hiding.”