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Abdul Rauf Daud Merchant, convicted killer of Indian music baron Gulshan Kumar, has been released from prison.
Published : 07 Nov 2016, 02:19 PM
Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal did not clarify whether he was handed over to India, where he is to stand trial.
“He (Merchant) has been released. His prison term for illegal trespass into Bangladesh ended some time ago,” he said.
Earlier, Jahangir Kabir, senior jail superintendent at Dhaka Central Jail, said the Indian national was let out of prison at Keraniganj around 4:30pm on Sunday.
Known to be close to Mumbai mafia don Dawood Ibrahim, a Dhaka court on Nov 3 relieved him of a case filed under Section-54.
Jail authorities said they were waiting to get the court’s paper before releasing him.
Maximum detention under Section-54 of the Penal Code is one month but Merchant was kept behind bars for much longer without explanation.
Allegedly a contract killer, he was sentenced to life term in India in 2002 for killing Gulshan Kumar who headed the music company, T-Series.
Kumar was shot while he was coming out of a temple on Aug 12, 1997. Merchant, however, filed an appeal against his conviction.
Mumbai police said he absconded after being released on parole in April, 2009 to visit his family in Mumbra, a small town about 40 km from Mumbai.
The same year, detectives arrested him from Brahmanbarhia’s Mourail, with two associates, while he was hiding in the residence of one Kamal Mian.
The Indian criminal was then sentenced to five years in prison for illegal trespass.
On Dec 2, 2014, he was arrested again from the jail gate at Dhaka Central Prison-2 at Kashimpur.
The next day he was produced in a Dhaka court which remanded him in police custody in a case filed under Section-54 for suspicious behaviour.
The remand plea read that interrogating him was necessary to find out if he had any links to terrorists.
In January, the home minister said Dhaka was working to extradite him.
Reports by Indian and Bangladeshi media then said steps to extradite a few Indian nationals, like Merchant, were initiated after the extradition of ULFA leader Anup Chetia from Bangladesh and Narayanganj seven-murder prime suspect Nur Hossain from India.
Dhaka rolled up its sleeves to extradite Merchant after a meeting between the home secretaries in November last year, media reports suggest.
It said Delhi asked for the extradition of three members of armed group Asif Reza Commando Force— Mawlana Mansur Ali Habibullah, Mufti Obaidullah alias Abu Zafar, Mawlana Emdadullah and top Kolkata criminals Zahid Sheikh and Arif Hussain.
According to those reports, Dhaka wanted top criminal Subrata Bain, prime suspect in Gazipur MP Ahsanullah Master’s murder ‘Dipu’, Islami Chhatra Shibir Chittagong chapter leader Sajjad Hossain and extremist leader Mukta Hossain, among others to be extradited.
