Police say they have detained two more members of an international human trafficking gang from Satkhira.
The duo – Amirul Islam, 32, and Abdus Salam Molla, 36 – were picked up by the law enforcers from a border area in Satkhira on Monday afternoon, as confirmed by DMP Tejgaon zone Deputy Commissioner Md Shahidullah.
He said that Amirul and Salam were part of an organized gang who lured women through the TikTok forum and sent them to India for purposes of sex slavery.
On June 1, police arrested three top leaders of the gang from Satkhira, hours after a girl from Dhaka’s Hatirjheel filed a case naming 12 people, including the trio.
They are linked to Rifadul ul Islam alias TikTok Hridoy, who was arrested in India recently. They have trafficked over 1,500 women and girls to the neighboring country in the past, police learnt through interrogating the arrested persons.
The teenage girl filed the case with Hatirjheel police station. She returned home 77 days after being trafficked to India, where she had been subjected to inhuman torture.
The law enforcers have intensified drives against human traffickers in Bangladesh after the Indian media reported the torture of a Bangladeshi woman at the hands of five traffickers, including Hridoy, on May 27. The Indian police arrested the five traffickers the following day.
What the case says
The teenager told the police that she had been introduced to Hridoy at Madhubagh Bridge in Hatirjheel in 2019.
Hridoy, with the help of the ring members in Satkhira, trafficked the teenager to India after they participated in a TikTok hangout at Lalon Shah Mazar in Kushtia on February 19 this year, according to DC Shahidullah.
In India, the girl was kept in several houses in Anandapur of Bengaluru, where she met some other young women, including the woman from the Hatirjheel area.
After a few days, the teenager was sent to OYO Hotel in Chennai. She was subjected to inhuman physical and perverted sexual abuse for 10 days. The ring members applied sedatives on her and forced her to send nude pictures to her family members.
She finally managed to escape from captivity along with two other Bangladeshi women with the help of the woman from Hatirjheel and returned to Bangladesh after 77 days.
