Chittagong residents shaken up as muggings go unchecked

Muggers are on the prowl in Chittagong swooping on their preys at dawn and in the evening around the city during the Ramadan and ahead of the Eid.

Two people have died in the past one month in mugging incidents. The muggers have been seen commonly using auto-rickshaws and motorcycles to carry out these crimes.

A foreign teacher of the Asian University for Women was the latest victim of mugging in the port city. She came under attack in Khulshi area and robbed of her mobile phone and laptop.

The teacher, however, lodged a complaint with Khulshi police on Thursday, OC Sheikh Md Nasir Uddin told bdnews24.com.

Later on Thursday night, police arrested one of the alleged muggers, named Nagar Pandit, from Outer Signal at Chandgaon. They also recovered the stolen gadgets of the foreign teacher.

Police say they are not very successful at stopping or catching these criminals for several reasons.

Officials say muggers used to commit crimes with weapons before, but now they use auto-rickshaws and motorcycles to ensure a quick getaway making it difficult for the police to arrest them.

Some college students and youths of well-off families have also ended up in these crimes, they added.

Law enforcers have found out that these muggers roam around in their vehicles under cover of passengers and transporters with proper documents, Deputy Commissioner (North) Abdur Warish of Chittagong Metropolitan Police or CMP told bdnews24.com.

“Inspection and searches go in vain. That’s why we can’t catch them.”

The streets and areas that are prone to mugging are Zakir Hossain Road, the street leading to Almas Intersection via Barik Building, Sarson Road and WASA from Nimtola Biswaroad, the street from Gani Bakery via Jamalkhan from Cheragi Pahar Intersetion and Chittagong College area.

These muggers with two-wheelers and three-wheelers in these areas mostly target women in rickshaws. Muggers snatch women’s purses while speeding past the rickshaws.

This style has already earned this group of muggers a nickname, ‘taan party’, which is roughly translated as the ‘party of snatchers’.

Some police officials, asking not to be named, said while the number of mugging incidents involving weapons dropped in the city, this group of snatchers became active.

These muggers often avoid roads with gridlock and choose targets on empty streets. At dawn, most of their victims include people going to or leaving bus or trains stations and people coming from or going to work.

While they remain mostly inactive during the day, the muggers run wild in the evening and later at night.

On the evening of June 13, a woman was badly injured when she fell from her rickshaw in the Jamalkhan neighbourhood while trying to save her purse from the snatchers on a motorcycle. Six days later, the woman, named Shirin Aktar, died undergoing treatment at Chittagong Medical College Hospital on Monday night.

Police have arrested a youth named Ershad Ullah over this incident. The officials said Ershad and another youth were the snatchers.

Additional Deputy Commissioner of CMP Shah Md Abdur Rouf told bdnews24.com, “Often, mugging victims don’t notify the police. They may reach out to some police officials they personally know, but most of the time that doesn’t lead to filing an official complaint with the police.”

“Take Ershad for instance. We recovered 45 stolen purses from his stash and many documents and valuables that possibly belonged to at least 45 people. But none of these victims filed any complaint or a case over the incidents of mugging.”

He added they were trying reach out to the victims based on the information from the recovered documents.

Rouf said, “Sometimes a victim will file a GD over losing his/her valuables instead of a mugging case, making it harder for the police to keep track of such incidents.”​

Officials said the muggers who get caught are always named in police records. But after they are released from jail, they return to their old crimes.

The law enforcers have so far identified 30 of these muggers who use auto-rickshaws to commit crimes. Nine of them are auto-rickshaw drivers.

An official of the Detective Branch or DB told bdnews24.com that the drivers were the leaders of these muggers. The whole act depends on them.

These nine drivers are Emon, Yunus, Farid, Shahjahan, Mostofa aka Akash, Zafar, Nazrul, Altaf and Yusuf. Of the other 21, the major criminals are Farid, Bhutto, Firoz, Zafar, Ismail and Selim.

CMP’s Deputy Commissioner (South) SM Mostain Hossain told bdnews24.com that many of the muggers were found to be old convicts.

They returned to mugging as soon as they secured bail and got out of police custody, he said.

Officials said the number of muggers using motorcycles has risen in recent times exponentially. They use helmets and carry proper documents to pass police inspection and searches very easily and later snatch people’s valuables the moment they get a chance away from the police.

A DB official, seeking anonymity, said many students who own motorcycles were also getting involved in these crimes.

Mostain Hossain, however, tried to allay the concerns saying they were working round the clock to tackle mugging incidents.