The mastermind of Sonali Bank heist and his associate were handed over to Kishoreganj police on Wednesday as a case in connection with Tk 16.40 crore robbery was filed there. Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) personnel handed over Habib alias Sohel Rana and his aide Idris alias Motahar to a team of Sadar police in the district, said Shahen Shah, Assistant Superintendent of police in Kishoreganj (Sadar).Shahen, who led the team, left Dhaka for Kishoreganj after receiving the duo, reports our Kishoreganj correspondent. Sohel, a 37-year-old man, digging a tunnel between his rented house and the main branch of Sonali Bank in the district, committed the robbery. RAB arrested Sohel and Motahar with Tk 16.19 crore around 3:00pm on Tuesday at a flat that Habib rented in the capital’s Shyampur two days after the robbery. Meanwhile, the recovered money was deposited to a branch of Sonali Bank in Dhaka on security ground, said AKM Fazlul Haque, the acting manager of the bank.Judge of Kishoreganj Judicial Magistrate Court ordered the authorities concerned to deposit the money in Dhaka in response to an appeal of Sheikh Aman Ullah, a Deputy General Manager of the bank.Normalcy was returning to the branch of Sonali Bank Limited in Kishoreganj Sadar on Wednesday.Bank employees and customers were seen as usual busy on Wednesday at the branch located on Isha Kha road. “We were very tensed for the last two days,” acting manager of the branch AKM Fazlul Haque said. “We are relieved after the criminal has been arrested and the money recovered.” “Activities and transactions at the bank has returned to normal,” he said. Sohel who worked as a construction worker in Dubai for three years from 2008, spent a year and a half to dig the tunnel to the bank’s vault.Sohel from Patuakhali got the idea of the heist from his wife’s maternal uncle Siraj and befriended an employee of the bank to get details. But the 22-feet tunnel dug and used for the sensational bank heist at the Sonali Bank branch in Kishoreganj’s Rathkhola is alarming.Sohel, the mastermind of the heist, says it took them two years to dig it. Greed kept them going as the digging was painstakingly slow. They had to dig by day and remove the earth, bucket by bucket, at night. And ensure they were not detected what they were up to.Now scores of residents are flocking to have a glimpse of the tunnel that ‘Sohel’ and ‘Idris’ used to decamp with Tk 164 million in one of the biggest — and perhaps the most silent — bank heist in Bangladesh. But most of those who want to take a look at the tunnel are not lucky.Heavy security is stopping them. Some even had to get ‘special permits’ from Sonali Bank officials or even manage local politicians to take a look at the tunnel.In a bid to put an end to the unwanted attention it was drawing, the bank authorities filled up the tunnel after getting an approval from the court on Tuesday afternoon.Meanwhile, a four-member panel of the Bangladesh Bank, led by its Joint Manager Fayez Uddin, visited the bank in the morning. The others who visited along with him were: Deputy Directors Rokanuzzaman, Kazi Abdul Mannan and Assistant Director Aminul Haque Dollar.
