THE High Court said on Wednesday that the Anti-Corruption Commission must take the responsibility of Jaha Alam for not getting bail much earlier. It should have taken initiatives so that Alam, who was wrongly in prison for three years because of an identity mess-up, obtains bail when it came to know that he is innocent, the court said.
The judges said the ACC is an independent institution and it should be transparent, saying that “what is the use of the cat that cannot catch rats”. The court directed the ACC to submit all the documents regarding the loan scam cases filed against Alam and others before the court and fixed April 10 for further hearing. On February 4, Alam was released from Kashimpur High Security Jail after the HC exonerated him from 26 corruption cases, in which he was in jail instead of the real accused, Abu Salek.
What is most interesting is that even after all the hullaballoo the ACC still has not taken any responsibility for wrongfully imprisoning Jaha Alam, claiming that he was arrested on the basis of documents submitted by Bangladesh Bank and Sonali Bank. But if that were true, it would be a matter of simple verification that Jaha Alam was in fact not Abu Salek, as the identity of both could easily have been ascertained through their NIDs.
NID verification, signature matching, fingerprint analysis, all of these forensic techniques could and should have been used to ascertain the true identity of individuals. But as we have seen no forensic analysis of any kind was done by ACC to independently verify the claims submitted by the banks.
It makes no sense as to why if the banks submitted documents pertaining to Abu Salek how Jaha Alam was arrested in the first place-the NIDs should have been vastly different. The ACC must go through a verification procedure by vetting the documents submitted by the banks in the future if they are to arrest the real accused and not the innocent. No one should have to spend two years in jail to be proven innocent–and that too on the basis of a newspaper report.
