Police get eight days to quiz four, including NSU pro-vice chancellor

A Dhaka court has given police eight days to interrogate four people, including the acting pro-vice chancellor of North South University (NSU), who were produced in court on charges of sheltering the Gulshan cafe attackers.

Counterterrorism Unit’s Additional Deputy Commissioner Saiful Islam said they had sought to show the four arrested under Section 54, which stipulates the circumstances allowing police to make an arrest without a warrant.

They were produced before a Dhaka metropolitan magistrate court, where the police wanted ten days to question each of them.

But the court granted eight days.

NSU pro-VC Professor M Gias Uddin Ahsan, his nephew Alam Chowdhury, and Mahbubur Rahman Tuhin, the manager of a house in Bashundhara Residential Area were arrested on Saturday afternoon.

Police said the five militants who carried out the attack on Gulshan cafe had taken shelter in a flat, owned by Ahsan, in a building at Bashundhara.

Alam and Tuhin dealt with the renting of the flat.

They had been arrested for not heeding police’s instruction about collecting information about tenants.

Several cartons packed with sand and the dresses they left behind in the flat were seized.

Police suspect the cartons were used to keep the grenades used in the attack that killed 20 hostages and two police officers.

On Sunday, police said that they raided a house in the capital’s Mirpur the previous night, which the attackers used as a second hideout and arrested the owner of the house, Nurul Islam.

It claimed to find improvised explosive device (IED), black dresses at the house in Mirpur’s Shewraparha.

Police have now produced the four in court and sought remand to interrogate them.