The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of police yesterday arrested a woman for alleged involvement in the abduction of a Bangladeshi man in South Africa.
Aleya Akhtar was arrested by CID officers as she attempted to withdraw money, paid as ransom, from a commercial bank in the capital’s Lalbagh area.
Police declined to name the bank but said the account in question showed a history of very large transactions followed by rapid withdrawals.
Nafees, 30, originally from the Gazaria area of Munshiganj and a resident of Johannesburg for the last nine years, was abducted on the night of June 2. He lived in the South African city with his sister and brother-in-law.
Nafees’ abduction gang, of which Aleya is suspected of being a member, demanded a ransom of Tk7 lakh to be deposited into a bank account. Nafees’ mother was told to make the payment to free her son.
Within half an hour of depositing the ransom, Aleya came to the bank to withdraw the money, CID Special Superintendent of police (Organised Crime) Mirza Abdullahel Baqui told the Dhaka Tribune.
CID sources said 18 days ago, the abducted man’s mother was contacted by an unknown caller who collected personal details about Nafees, his sister and their whereabouts. The next day Nafees was kidnapped.
On June 3, the day after the kidnapping, Nafees’ sister Tania informed her mother that Nafees had gone missing.
An hour after the first telephone call, Tania called back and told her mother that Nafees had been kidnapped and a Tk7 lakh ransom had been demanded for his release.
The money was to be deposited in a bank in the capital.
The kidnapped man’s distraught mother, taking advice from a neighbour, informed the CID who asked the bank to freeze all online transactions of the account in question.
They instructed the bank to limit transactions on the account to cheque and cash transactions.
The CID team then called Nafees’ mother and asked her to make the deposit.
With the trap set, the money was deposited, Aleya came to make the withdrawal and the police took her into custody.
But following her arrest, members of the abduction gang threatened to make Nafees’ life more difficult in a phone call to his mother, a CID official said.
A kidnapping case was filed with Lalbagh police station and Aleya Akhtar was shown arrested in the case.
Yesterday, a man calling himself Taijul and claiming to be Aleya’s husband called the CID from South Africa and claimed he had deposited the money.
When asked how he had deposited the money, he said a man named Mohsin had promised to deposit the money into his wife’s account in exchange for money he had paid Mohsin in South Africa.
When asked to prove his version of the story, Taijul took Mohsin and a man named Wasim to a local police station in Johannesburg and called Bangladeshi CID. Mohsin, however, denied on the telephone that he had had any financial transactions with Taijul.
South African police later detained the three expatriate Bangladeshis who remain in police custody.
The CID special superintendent said a report had been sent to the Foreign Ministry and investigators were awaiting feedback from them. If needed, a CID team may be sent to South Africa, he told the Dhaka Tribune.
“The worst thing is that the victim is still missing. The police will do its best to find and free him,” he said.
He said Nafees’ sister called him yesterday and said somebody identifying himself as a Pakistani national had called her and told her to let the arrested suspect, Aleya, go free.
The Pakistani caller told Nafees’ sister that Nafees would be set free in exchange for Aleya’s freedom, and no ransom would have to be paid, the CID official said.
The CID official said an investigation was under way and police were looking into the mysterious foreign caller and his links to the kidnapping.
