Moghbazar killers arrested

Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) has arrested six people who were 'directly involved' in the Moghbazar triple murders.

It said they were hired to kill those three people on Aug 28 and had plans to murder several others after buying firearms.

The six were nabbed from different parts of Dhaka on Friday night.

They are - Al Amin, 25, Saiful Siam, 24, Ramzan Ali, 20, Rubel Miah alias Sunny, 25, Maruf Hossain, 26, and Shafin Laskar, 25.

Two pistols and three knives were recovered from them, said the elite force's officials.

RAB media wing director Mufti Mahmud Khan at a press briefing on Saturday said the murders were a sequel to a dispute over the possession of a plot of land misappropriated from the Bangladesh Railway.

The land is situated right beside a mosque on Chan Bakery Lane at Moghbazar's Sonalibagh.

On Aug 28, a group of assailants entered a house at Sonalibagh and shot dead three people -- the house's owner ‘Brishty’ alias ‘Ranu’, 30, tenants ‘Munna’, 22, and ‘Belal’, 20.

The family blamed local "crime boss" Shah Alam Khandakar alias Kala Babu, saying he had been demanding extortion money for some time. They claimed the murders took place as the money was not paid.

Ranu's brother Shamim alias Kala Chan filed a case over the murders naming Babu as the prime suspect.

Earlier, police had arrested six suspects including Babu out of the 15 named in the case.

On Sept 15, Kala Babu died in what the police described as a 'shootout' in Dhaka.

However, Siam, one of those arrested Friday night, confessed that he was planning to buy a gun with the money he got for killing the trio, RAB official Mufti Mahmud Khan said.

He said Siam had planned to kill Kala Chan and several others to establish dominance in T&T Colony area in the capital.

RAB said the land in question was under possession of local criminal Rony for sometime. After Rony was arrested two years ago, Kala Babu and his friends took control of the land and the house and started collecting the rents.

They took full possession of the land when Rony fled to Dubai after securing bail.

Babu's cousin Rony and Kala Chan later managed to recover half of the land's possession as Babu, Siam and others went into hiding following two recent murders in the area.