Staff Reporter :Forensic experts have said that Zihad’s death was caused due to drowning in the water when he had fallen into the abandoned deep tube-well. The 4-year child had suffered head injuries too.After post-mortem, Chief of Forensic Department at Dhaka Medical College and Hospital Dr Habibuzzaman Chowdhury said that there were several internal and external injury marks in the boy’s head.”As the pipe contained water, we have come to the conclusion that the child had suffered suffocation being drowned in the water within two hours of his fall,” the physician said. The autopsy was performed by Habibuzzaman Chowdhury along with Forensic Department Assistant Professor AKM Shafiuzzaman Khair and lecturer Pradip Kumar Biswas. Besides, Jihad’s mother Khadija Akter and father Nasir Fakir were at the hospital during the autopsy.Shahjahanpur Police Station Sub-Inspector Abu Jafar compiled the autopsy report. “Skin in various portion of his body, including the head, was peeled off. Initially, it seems he had died due to lack of oxygen in the pipe,” he said.Police said the body was handed over to the family around at 9:45am on Sunday at the end of the post-mortem.Zihad’s uncle Monir Hossain said that the boy was buried at their ancestral home of Damuda village at Goshairhat upazila in Shariatpur on Sunday evening.The child fell through a 17-inch wide opening of an abandoned deep tube-well a few hundred feet down at the Shahjahanpur Railway Colony in Dhaka on Friday afternoon.After 23 hours of frantic rescue efforts, Fire Service authorities said around 3:00pm Saturday there was no sign of Zihad’s presence inside the pipe. Minutes later some earnest volunteers pulled the child up with the help of traditional hand-made instruments.Zihad’s father Nasir Fakir filed a case on Saturday night against Abdus Salam, owner of RS House, the construction company responsible for setting the pipe and Jahangir Alam, senior Railway sub-assistant engineer, bringing charges of negligence.Meanwhile, State Minister for Home Affairs Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal has defended the quizzing of Zihad’s father by police, saying it was done with an ‘honest intention’ when all efforts of the fire service to rescue the boy from the well went in vain on Friday night.Zihad’s father, along with two witnesses, was taken into police custody around 300am on Saturday. Fakir was released after his son’s body was pulled out of the hole later in the day.Kamal said, “He was not [detained] with ill intentions. It is regrettable if there was any incident of torture. Zihad’s father was detained and quizzed when the fire service members could not even detect the boy even after surveying the well with the camera.””If there had been any other intention, it would be investigated,” Kamal told the press briefing held at the Home Ministry in the Secretariat after a meeting of the National Committee on Militancy Resistance and Prevention.The heads of different law enforcement agencies were present at the meeting.Echoing the same, Inspector General of Police [IGP] Hassan Mahmood Khandaker has defended the Shajahanpur police for questioning Zihad’s father and also strongly denied allegations of torturing Zihad’s father in police custody.The IGP said the police interrogated him in a ‘friendly manner’ to ‘crack the mystery’.According to police chief, Shahjahanpur police suspected that Nasir Fakir had hidden his son and wanted to know the ‘truth’. The IGP said, “He wasn’t tortured, rather he was amicably questioned.” “Nasir was taken into custody with the honest intention to unravel the mystery. Anyone with the smallest bit of humanity could not have hurt him in such situation. However, we will look into allegations of torture,” the IGP also said.When asked why the interrogation lasted for long 12 hours, the IGP said, “We’ll also inquire why the extra time was needed.”Nearly 23 hours after four-year-old boy Zihad slipped into a deep pipe of an abandoned railway pump at Shahjahanpur Railway Colony, some volunteers retrieved his body within just fifteen minutes.When the trained rescuers of Fire Service and Civil Defence [FSCD] failed and postponed their rescue operation, a group of young and talented volunteers came forward to show their talent. Led by Md Shafiqul Islam Faruq, the group comprised Shah Md Abdullah Al Moon, Sujon Dash Ruhul, Abu Bakar Siddique, Anwar Hossain, Kabir Murad, Noor Mohammad, Abdul Majid, Shahjahan Ali and Abdul Kader Chowdhury. They had made a “catcher” with iron rods along with a net, a CCTV camera and a torch light. The employees of a private company named Icon Engineers gave technical assistance while Faruq gave money to buy raw materials for the cage and wielding the iron rods.The cage [catcher], made of three vertically-fixed iron rods, was hardly five-feet long in height. Its upper part is attached with a round-shape rod and it was fixed with two separate iron rods. Then a strong rope was tied just centre of the cage’s mouth. At the extreme bottom of the cage there was a powerful iron hook of 45 degree angle. The nylon rope which was tied with Zihad’s body was caught with that hook. The volunteers sent the cage down the pipe with the help of a crane, but failed repeatedly as the CCTV cable was creating problems. At one stage, they were able to send the tool nearly 300ft down and became successful at around 300pm.”We sent the cage with a 600-foot rope. After it went down nearly 300 feet, we felt something hard and through the CCTV camera we saw that the ‘catcher’ had hooked into something,” Faruq said after completion of the operation.Meanwhile, the vehicular Bengali daily Bhorer Kagoj on Sunday accord a reception to three young volunteers – Md Shafiqul Islam Faruq, Shah Md Abdullah Al Moon and Sujon Dash Ruhul – for their outstanding performance in rescue operation.
