Two abductees rescued

Police have rescued two people from Tangail after they were abducted by a gang from two different areas on Tuesday.

Four of the abductors were also arrested on Thursday afternoon when they came at Tangail’s Kalihati Upazila to collect the ransom, police said.

Readymade garment worker ‘Arif’, 25, of Kalihati, was abducted from Dhaka’s Ashulia on Tuesday evening.

10th grader Ekramul Alam Dipu, 14, of Gazipur’s Joydebpur Upazila, was whisked away from the Upazila’s Mirergaon village only several hours earlier.

Kalihati Police Station OC Monir Hossain said the captors had called both of their families and demanded ransom.

They called Arif’s father Tota Miah over phone on Thursday morning and demanded Tk 200,000, Hossain said.

Tota Miah sent Tk 20,000 to the abductors via bKash, a mobile phone-based money transfer system.

Then he asked them to come to Kalihati’s Paikorha village by 5pm to collect the rest of the money, a trap set up by police.

The OC said they arrested the abductors after they came in a microbus along with the two abductees in the afternoon.

The vehicle was also seized.

The arrestees were identified as Ershad Ali, Asadul Islam, Ismail Hossain and Khandker Azizur Rahman.

There has been a disturbing hike in abductions in recent times in Bangladesh.

Eight people were abducted only from Narayanganj in the past two weeks. One of them, husband of environmental lawyer Syeda Rizwana Hasan, was found alive nearly 35 hours later.

But seven others, abducted on Apr 27, including a Narayanganj City Corporation councillor were found dead.

Bodies of six of them were recovered on Wednesday from the Shitalakhya river while the other one was found on Thursday.