Dhaka hotel rape: Raintree provides a messy statement

Owners of Banani’s Raintree hotel where two girls were allegedly raped have called for justice, but failed to answer questions from the media.

Managing Director HM Adnan Haroon read out an English statement in the hotel’s lobby on Tuesday but went silent after journalists began to ask questions.

The son of Jhalakathi MP Bazlul Haque Haroon, however, promised to cooperate with the high-profile investigation, demanding justice for the victims.   

Frank Forget, the hotel’s general manager, also tried to issue a statement in English, but journalists objected to that. 

A Bangla statement was then read out by Reza Golam Mostafa, general manager of Al-Humyra Group that owns the hotel. MP BH Haroon is the chairman of Al-Humyra Group.

The university students who started the case said they went to the hotel on Mar 28 after being invited to the birthday party of Shafat Ahmed, son of an owner of Apan Jewellers.

They accuse Shafat and his friend Nayem Ashraf of dragging them into a room and raping them at gunpoint with the help of their friend Shadman Shakif, Shafat’s driver Billal Hossain and bodyguard Rahmat Ali.

Mahir Haroon, brother of Adnan Haroon, is one of the key persons in running the hotel at Block-K in Banani residential area. It was alleged that Shafat booked the room saying he was a friend of owner Mahir.

One of the girls claimed to have met a person called Mahir before being forced into a room.

“Someone called Mahir introduced himself as the owner and brought a cake to Shafat for his birthday,” she said.

“The actual story is, the hotel presents complimentary birthday cakes to guests for birthdays and marriage anniversaries. The hotel gave a cake to Shafat Ahmed based on that practice. The cake has no personal connection to Mahir Haroon,” said Al-Humyra Group’s Mostafa.

He claimed records of check-in and check-out were properly preserved and handed over to the investigators.

Commenting on reports that the hotel deleted security footage from the night of the rapes, he said international standard hotels keep CCTV footage up to 30 days.

“This hotel also preserves CCTV footage for a 30-day cycle after which the system automatically overwrites the data to begin storing new data.”

The hotel was notified about the incident 38 days after it happened. But the security footage from that night was by then deleted.”

Narcotics detectives were unable to find anything after “searching every room” on May 13, he said. 

“So we’ll ask you to think about how customs managed to find 10 bottles of alcohol in one room the next day.” 

He refused to comment when asked if they believed the customs planted the bottles to cause troubles for the hotel. 

General Manager Frank Forget was in the hotel until 11:30pm on the night of the alleged crime, said Mostafa. 

“He didn’t say he didn’t notice anything unnatural on the day of the incident – he only meant it in terms of the hotels operations. Even the victims didn’t report anything to the hotel authorities.”

Adnan Haroon refused to say how long Shafat held his birthday party at the hotel’s rooftop. “The matter is under investigation. I can’t say anything about it.”

After dodging some more questions about “matters under investigation”, the hotel officials left the conference abruptly, without any announcements. 

The hotel came under focus after the university students started the case on May 6 saying the perpetrators had warned them against alerting the authorities. 

Since then it has been searched by customs detectives who claimed to have found other irregularities in the running of the hotel. 

The authorities said they were preparing to start cases for money laundering, and evasion of tax and duty payments. The owners have also been summoned for questioning.