Staff Reporter :
The High Court on Monday issued a rule upon the respondents to explain in two weeks as to why they should not be directed to release 83 Bangladeshis who had been sent to jail after returning from abroad during the coronavirus pandemic.
Home secretary, foreign secretary, law secretary, inspector general of police and inspector general of prisons have been asked to comply with the rule within.
The High Court bench of Justice JBM Hassan and Justice Md Khairul Alam passed the order after hearing a writ petition filed by Md Salah Uddin Regan, a Supreme Court lawyer, as a public interest litigation.
Mr Md Salah Uddin Reagan himself took part in the
hearing, while deputy attorney general Nur Us Sadik represented the state.
Eighty-three Bangladeshis, who returned from Vietnam and Qatar, were sent to jail on September 1 this year by a Dhaka court after police had shown them arrested under section 54 of penal code on completion of 14-day quarantine in the capital. Of them, 81 returned from Vietnam and two from Qatar. The arrested were detained in jails of those countries on charges of involving in different crimes and irregularities, police said.
But the government of those countries pardoned them and sent them back to Bangladesh due to the coronavirus pandemic. Though they got amnesty in the abroad, they failed to get it in their own country.
Lawyer Md Salah Uddin Reagan said, “The returnees got amnesty from the authorities of the countries in where they had been detained on different charges. So they could not be detained in Bangladesh again as they got amnesty from the countries concerned and as the government didn’t bring them to the country under the prisoner repatriation agreement.” A Dhaka court on July 4 this year sent more 219 returnees to jail. Among them 141 returned from Kuwait, 39 from Qatar and 39 from Bahrain.
Officer in Charge of the Turag Police Station, Nurul Muttakin, earlier said that his two colleagues were investigating the cases of the returnees and it would take some more time. Court will decide over their release after submitting the probe reports, added the OC.
