The Criminal Investigation Department of West Bengal police arrested a butcher involved in connection with the murder of Bangladesh MP Anwarul Azim Anar on Friday. The butcher allegedly helped the accused to dispose Anar’s body parts at different locations.
According to police, the butcher, Jihar Hawaldar, was arrested from the Bongaon area in North 24 Parganas district and he reportedly admitted during interrogation that he had helped the other accused in chopping the victim's body before disposing the parts in different locations, an officer told PTI.
The investigation into the suspected murder of the Bangladesh MP has revealed gory details which suggest he was honey-trapped before being strangulated and brutally dismembered.
Anwarul arrived in Kolkata on May 12 and stayed at his friend Gopal Biswas’s residence in the city’s Baranagar area for two days before going missing. He maintained communication with the family until May 14. On May 16, a call was made from the MP's phone to his personal assistant, Abdur Rauf. Unfortunately, Rauf missed the call, and subsequent attempts to call back were unsuccessful as the phone was switched off by then. Since then, the MP has remained unreachable.
Bengal Police confirmed the murder the Anar, an Awami League MP from Jhenaidah-4 segment in Bangladesh, on Wednesday, after the victim went missing from Kolkata on May 13.
State CID sleuths on Friday took Jihad Hawaldar to the Bhangar area where the chopped body parts were put in plastic bags and scattered across different places, the officer said.
"The accused is a Bangladeshi citizen and a butcher by profession. He had entered India illegally and was staying in Mumbai hiding his true identity. He was called to Kolkata a couple of months back as a part of the plan to kill Anar. He has admitted that he was an accomplice to the four men who murdered the politician inside the flat and helped them in skinning and chopping the body," the police officer told PTI.
The arrested accused would be produced at a court in Barasat later Friday while a team of CID officers were in the process of searching for the victim's body parts at the Krishnamati village in Bhangar, where the butcher had led them.
An initial probe also found out that the MP's close friend Akhtaruzzaman, a US citizen, had paid around Rs 5 crore to those involved in the crime, the senior police officer said.
A team of the West Bengal CID visited Bangladesh on Thursday to interrogate the three accused who were arrested by Bangladesh police in connection with the case. The trio were identified as Amanullah Aman, Shilasti Rahman and Faisal Ali.
According to police, the MP's friend has a flat in Kolkata, and is probably in the US at present. Circumstantial evidence indicated that the MP was first strangulated and killed after which his body was chopped into pieces, police claimed.
The search for the missing MP, who reportedly arrived in Kolkata on May 12 to undergo medical treatment, began after Gopal Biswas, a resident of Baranagar in north Kolkata and an acquaintance of the Bangladeshi politician, filed a complaint with the local police on May 18.
-with inputs from agencies.