Court Correspondent :
A Dhaka court yesterday summoned book trader Manzurul Azim Palash and his wife Ruma Chowdhury, and asked them to appear in the court on October 25 in a case filed about stealing some paintings of celebrated novelist, screenwriter and filmmaker Humayun Ahmed.
Dhaka’s Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Md Tofazzal Hossain passed the order accepting the probe report submitted by the Police Bureau of Investigation (PBI) on June 23 of this year.
On June 29, last year, Humayun Ahmed’s wife actress Meher Afroz Shaon filed the case with the court against the accused people for their alleged involvement with committing the offences.
The court recorded Shaon’s statements, took cognizance of the charges and directed PBI to submit a report after investigation into the matter.
According to the case statement, the late writer drew some portraits along with his younger son Nishad Humayun back in 2012 when he was undergoing cancer treatment in New York. He handed over 24 of those paintings to Ruma Chowdhury and her ex-husband Bishwajit Shaha in June 2012 on the condition that those would be returned to him unscathed.
The accused couple tried to coax Humayun into selling the paintings, to the duo getting a commission of the sales. However, Humayun turned down the offer.
After several conversations following the writer’s death, they returned twenty of the paintings to his mother Ayesha Foyez in February 2013.
Years after the incident, the issue gained momentum after one of the stolen paintings resurfaced in Cumilla. Ruma’s present husband Palash, gave a Facebook post on March 31 claiming that an art exhibition displayed an original art piece of Humayun Ahmed.
The 10-day exhibition titled “Selected paintings of hundred artists from Bangladesh and India” was organized by Link Bangla, a venture of Palash.
The complainant alleged that event organizers did not obtain the painting legally and it was part of the four paintings that were not returned to Humayun’s family back in 2013.
