Sylhet court orders reinvestigation of Ananta murder case rejecting chargesheet letting off 11

A Sylhet court has rejected the chargesheet submitted by the CID recommending letting off 11 accused in the case over the murder of blogger Ananta Bijoy Das.

The judge of Metropolitan Magistrate Court-3, Haridash Kumar, on Tuesday also ordered police to reinvestigate and file a supplementary chargesheet.
 
APP Khokan Kumar Dutta toldbdnews24.com: “The court ordered to probe again and submit the findings again as the filed chargesheet had faults.”
 
Dhaka CID’s Inspector Arman Ali on Aug 28 had submitted the chargesheet accusing five people in the murder case.
 
They are Abul Hossain, 25, Faisal Ahmed, 27, Harunur Rashid, 25, Mannan Yahiya alias Mannan Rahi alias AB Mannan Yahiya alias Ibn Moeen, 24, and Abul Khayer Rashid Ahmed, 24.
 
Of them, only Mannan Yahiya and Abul Khayer are currently in jail. The others are still on the run.
 
The investigation officer had also recommended letting off 11 others including extremist blogger Shafiur Rahman Farabi as there were ‘no evidence of their involvement in the murder’.
 
Farabi was arrested and interrogated in this case earlier.
 
Secular blogger Ananta, also an organiser of Sylhet Ganajagaran Mancha, was hacked to death in front of his house at Sylhet City’s Subidbazar on May 12 last year, barely two months after writer-blogger Avijit Roy was killed in a similar attack in Dhaka.
 
His elder brother Ratneshwar Das started the case with Sylhet Airport police a day later.
 
Afterwards, a purported Twitter profile of extremist group ‘Ansar Bangla 8’ said that the al-Qaeda in Indian Sub-continent (AQIS) had claimed responsibility for the killing.

At one point of the investigation, police booked several people already arrested over Avijit’s killing in the Ananta murde case too and said one group was behind both murders.
 
Police had started the probe, but the case was later handed over to the CID’s Organised Crime Department.