Five former SUST students detained for ‘financing’ anti-VC protest

Five former students of the Shahjalal University of Science and Technology who were arrested earlier in Dhaka face charges of financing protests designed to force Vice-Chancellor Farid Uddin Ahmed out.

Sylhet Metropolitan Police Commissioner Nisharul Arif on Tuesday said they were arrested on charges of "having ties to criminal activities through initially financing the protesting students".

Police were trying to know from the arrestees if the protesting students were spending or planned to spend the money to carry out "terrorism", he added

Among the five arrestees are two who were picked up from Uttara on Monday evening - Habibur Rahman Swapan and Reza Noor Muin -- alumni of the Computer Science and Engineering Department and Architecture Department.

The three others are Nazmus Sakib Dip, AKM Maruf Hossain and Foysal Ahmed.

Shah Raji Siddique, managing director of an IT firm, who lives in the same building in Uttara, shared the news of the two men 'being detained’ on Facebook on Monday.

A former student of the CSE department at SUST himself, Siddique claimed to be the “local guardian” of Swapan.

"Some people identifying themselves as CID officials picked them from the Uttara house on Monday night. They were kept inside a microbus for an hour. That was the time we spoke to [the officials]," he said.

At that time, Siddique said that the CID officials had told him that the men were nabbed for helping the student protesters by providing money.

The protesters in an emergency meeting in the wee hours of Monday said several mobile accounts of former and current students who provided them with financial support had become inactive.

“We received money from former students in at least six accounts every day. They sent support for our fellow students who were on hunger strike. The transactions from those accounts have been shut since Monday afternoon. We could not do anything about it even after contacting [mobile banking] authorities.”

Mobile banking authorities made no comment on the matter.