Staff Reporter :The Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) arrested two key suspects in connection with the gang-rape of a tribal girl in a running microbus in the city last week.The arrestees are identified as Ashraf alias Tushar, 35, and microbus driver Zahidul Islam Lavlu, 26. Both of them work for a buying house Signet in Dhaka.Six days after the gang-rape, the prime suspect Tushar was picked up from Kalapara upazila in Patuakhali district about 1:00am on Wednesday. Later acting on his information, RAB men arrested Lavlu from the city’s Gulshan-1 area about 5:30am. Police also seized the microbus used in the crime from the city’s Banani on the same day.RAB said, the arrestees have confessed their involvement in the crime and also admitted that they had talked to the victim several times before she was picked up last week. Earlier, they had allured the girl with a better job offer. “Threatening to kill her, Tushar and Lavlu raped the girl inside that running microbus one after another,” Mufti Mahmud Hassan, RAB Legal and Media Wing Director, said at a press conference at the RAB-1 Headquarters in the city yesterday. According to the statement of the culprits, they had planned to rape the girl on May 18 and Tushar was the mastermind of this crime while two other drivers named Lavlu and Firoz were also with him, claimed the elite force official.”Both the arrested persons have confessed during preliminary interrogation that they raped the girl after dragging her into the vehicle. Video footages from CCTV cameras were analysed, while the victim’s statement also helped in making the identification,” RAB spokesperson said.Earlier on May 17, Tushar, along with two African female clients of the buying house he works for, went to the Textmart showroom of Jamuna Future Park where the victim works as a sales person. At that time Tushar talked with the tribal girl and offered her a lucrative job in the buying house. He also took cell phone number of the girl. Tushar made at least three calls to the woman in the following days. In the meantime, he made appointment with the girl to get her bio-data for ‘proposed job’. On 21 May, after the girl finished her shift and left her workplace, Tushar and his companion Lavlu met her on her way home and offered her a ride on their microbus. When she refused, they forcefully dragged her inside the microbus.Inspector (Investigation) Sazzad Hossain of Bhatara Police Station said: “We have collected footage from the CCTV cameras installed at different establishments on the route followed by the microbus during the incident.””The girl has said earlier in her police complaint that she was raped by five men. The orgy continued for 90 minutes in the running microbus before she was dumped off at Uttara.” Her family filed a case with Bhatara Police Station the next day. Signs of forced sex were found when she was physically examined the day after.
