Four sent to jail in anti-middlemen drive near passport office

A mobile court has sentenced four people arrested by the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) to different jail terms following a special anti-middlemen drive in the area adjacent to the passport office in Agargaon.

The drive was conducted on Monday morning, RAB-2 said in a press statement.

The arrestees are Abu Saleh, 26, Aynal Haque, 65, Md Sujon, 28 and Swapan Pathan, 36. Saleh, Aynal and Sujon were given 10 days in jail while Swapan was punished with a week.

The drive was conducted from 10am to 12pm, the statement said.

“An organised gang of middlemen roam around the passport office and lure people seeking passports with promises to submit their fee at the bank, fill up their passport form, get it attested, fix any errors in the documents, provide false documents on behalf of the applicant, or even offer to make a passport without any verification for Tk 5,000 to 6,000.”

When people came to realise the middlemen were frauds and started avoiding them, the middlemen would use a range of means to harass them, the statement said.