Four members of human trafficking ring arrested for raping woman
Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) members have arrested four members of a human trafficking ring on charges of raping a woman after taking her to Dhaka.
The victim was brought to Dhaka from Moulvibazar in the name of teaching the Arabic language to be sent to Saudi Arabia.
RAB-3 captain Lt Colonel Arif Mahiuddin revealed this information during a press conference at the media centre of RAB in the capital’s Karwan Bazar on Saturday.
He said the victim contacted RAB over the mobile phone and sought help. After that, RAB rescued the woman from Rampura area in Dhaka and arrested four suspects on Wednesday night.
The four arrestees are: Tofail Ahmed, Kamrul Ahmed, Khaled Masood Helal and Md Jamal.
The RAB-3 captain further said arrested Tofail Ahmed and the victim are from the same area. He promised to send her to Saudi Arabia.
Tofail told the victim that she needed to go to Dhaka to learn Arabic if she really wanted to go to Saudi Arabia.
Later, Tofail took her to the house of Kamrul Ahmed, another member of the ring, in the capital’s Rampura area and raped her.
A case was filed at the Rampura police station in connection with this incident under the Women and Children Repression Prevention Act. The arrested four have been shown arrested in connection with the incident. The victim has been admitted to the one stop crisis centre (OCC) of Dhaka Medical College.
Regarding the human trafficking ring, captain Arif Mahiuddin said the four arrestees are members of an organised human trafficking ring and fraud ring. Kamrul is the chief of this ring. Three others are his associates.
They do not have any permission to send migrants abroad. They have been sending women to the Middle East by promising them jobs. However, they are not getting any jobs abroad. Many of them are living in inhuman conditions there.
Sometimes, they are providing people with fake passports, visas and tickets after promising to send them to European countries. They are swindling Tk 500,000 to Tk 700,000 from each person. In this way, the ring has embezzled around Tk 10 million from more than a hundred people in five years.
The members of the ring keep changing their address from time to time, said Arif Mahiuddin. Only after reaching the airport, the victims come to realise that they have been deceived. And when the victims contact the members of the ring, they change their address. They have changed their address eight times in the last two years in this way.
According to RAB, Kamrul Islam, the chief of the ring has studied up to Class nine. He doesn’t have any fixed profession. However, deceiving and human trafficking is his main profession. He went to Dubai in a travel visa in 2019. There he got the permanent residency in Dubai with the money earned through human trafficking. He returned to the country in May 2021. He does not have any licence for sending migrants. He manages travel visas from different tour and travel agencies and sends people abroad using these visas.
Jamal Mahbub, one of Kamrul’s main accomplices, works as the assistant manager of an agency named Mahbub International.
Jamal has studied up to Class seven. Another arrestee Khaled was in Saudi Arabia for about 15 years. He got involved in human trafficking after returning to the country in 2016. The main accused in this case, Tofail, is a driver by profession. He has been working as one of Kamrul’s accomplices for a few years.