Police say they have solved the killing of a retired schoolteacher and three family members in Rangpur city, saying two drug users strangled them one by one after being spotted using yaba inside the victims’ home.
According to the metropolitan police commissioner’s account, the two killed the family because they feared being identified, then robbed the house of gold jewelry, bathed inside, and used more yaba before leaving.
Rangpur Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mohammad Abdul Mabud briefed reporters on the case at a conference room at his office Sunday afternoon, August 23.
“Through the joint efforts of all our police units, intelligence agencies, media workers and social workers, we have been able to solve this brutal killing within a short time,” the commissioner said. “Ganapati Chakraborty was a respected man. He had no dispute with anyone.” He said the motive became clear once two men from the area, identified as Siddhartha and Mugdho Das, were arrested.
Based on the interrogation of the two arrested men and other information gathered during the investigation, the commissioner described how the killings unfolded.
He said that in the small hours after Thursday, August 20, Mugdho Das and Siddhartha climbed onto the roof of Ganapati Chakraborty’s house from the roof of a neighboring house belonging to a man identified as Debu Chakraborty. There, they sat and used yaba.
Ganapati Chakraborty, hearing noise, went up to the roof, bare-chested with a gamchha, a traditional cotton towel, over his shoulder. When he asked Siddhartha and Mugdho Das what they were doing there and questioned them about the drug use, they panicked, fearing he would identify them. The two immediately strangled him with the gamchha around his neck, killing him on the roof.
The commissioner said Ganapati Chakraborty struggled for his life during the attack, and the resulting noise drew his wife, Pritilata Chakraborty, also known as Bola Bashari, who tried to go up from downstairs. As she climbed the stairs, the two men strangled her as well.
The commissioner grew emotional as he described the killing of the couple’s two children. He said the screaming had also drawn the couple’s daughter, Prarthi Chakraborty, also known as Agami, who came to see what was happening — and the two men strangled her too.
“From what the killers told us, Prarthi Chakraborty would not die,” the commissioner said. “It took four to five minutes for her to stop breathing. During that time, they wrapped a rope around her neck and across her mouth and pulled it so hard that it caused severe facial injuries.”
The commissioner said the two men then went downstairs and killed the couple’s younger child, a 12-year-old boy in the fifth grade. Visibly struggling to continue, the commissioner said the boy was killed because Siddhartha’s own younger brother was friends with him, and the boy could have identified the killers through that connection. Fearing exposure, Siddhartha decided the boy could not be allowed to live. The two men then strangled the boy with cloth and, to ensure he was dead, smothered him with a pillow.
The commissioner said the killers did not stop there. Afterward, they bathed inside the house — Siddhartha first, then Mugdho Das — and then sat at the dining table and ate dates from a jar before using a remaining piece of yaba. Investigators say they found evidence of the drug use at the scene.
By the time they finished, it was morning — a Friday, the day of the Muslim weekly congregational prayers. The two waited inside the house for the streets to empty out as people went to Friday prayers before leaving with a large quantity of stolen gold jewelry.
Police said Siddhartha works as a goldsmith, employed for eight years at a jewelry shop identified as P.K. Paul Jewellers, and was able to distinguish real gold from imitation. Investigators said they found one piece of jewelry that had been tested with fire — a method commonly used to verify gold — which led them to suspect a person experienced in the trade was involved, a theory that was borne out when Siddhartha was identified as a goldsmith.
The commissioner said the two men deliberately left the house in disarray — furniture and belongings scattered — in an apparent attempt to make the killings look like a robbery and mislead investigators. Before leaving around midday, they also soaked two mobile phones from the house in a bucket of water mixed with detergent, apparently to destroy any fingerprints.
Police said they recovered some of the stolen jewelry from an abandoned spot behind a temple, based on information provided by the two suspects.
The commissioner said Mugdho Das and Siddhartha are cousins. Before the killings, the two had used yaba at another house, belonging to a man identified as Shimanto, who police said was not involved in the killings, before going to the rooftop where they encountered Ganapati Chakraborty.
Police said they also identified a yaba dealer, known as Khushi or Proshanto, who operates near a fish shop in the city market close to Mugdho Das’s house, from whom the two allegedly bought the drug at 350 taka per piece.
The commissioner said the investigation is continuing and that police would share any new findings in future briefings.
Separately, teachers and students of Rangpur Zilla School held a human chain Sunday afternoon demanding justice in the case and submitted a memorandum to the police commissioner. Students of Carmichael College held a similar demonstration with the same demand.
The four members of the family were found dead in the early hours of Thursday, August 20, inside their locked home in the Machhuapara area of the city. The dead were identified as Ganapati Chakraborty, a retired teacher at Rangpur Zilla School who ran a homeopathic practice at the Cooperative Market after retiring; his wife, Pritilata Chakraborty; their daughter, Prarthi Chakraborty, who had recently completed a master’s degree in English from Carmichael College; and their 12-year-old son, a fifth-grade student at Zilla School.
Police recovered the bodies from the family’s locked two-story house near a temple in Machhuapara following an operation that ran from 11 p.m. Saturday, August 22, to 5 a.m. the next morning. Ganapati Chakraborty’s body was found on the rooftop; his wife’s and daughter’s bodies were found beneath the stairwell leading to the roof; and the boy’s body was found under a bed inside the house. The family’s ancestral home is in the Mirzapur area of Mithapukur upazila, Rangpur.
Pritilata Chakraborty’s sister, Puja Chakraborty, said she last spoke to her sister by phone around 1:30 a.m. on Thursday, August 20. When she tried calling again around 8:45 p.m. Saturday, August 22, the phone was switched off, as were the phones of her brother-in-law, niece and nephew. She and her husband went to the house around 10:30 p.m. that night.
“When we got there, the main gate was locked,” she said. “We asked people nearby, but no one could tell us anything.” They then knocked on the door of a neighboring three-story house belonging to a man identified as Debu, whose family let them through to reach the house from the back. “Everything inside was in disarray. The wardrobe and other furniture were open, and things were scattered across the floor,” she said. She immediately sent her husband, Bipul Acharya, to the police station.
Bipul Acharya, Ganapati Chakraborty’s brother-in-law, said he first called the national emergency hotline 999, which advised him to go to Kotwali police station. Officers from the police, the Criminal Investigation Department and the Police Bureau of Investigation then went to the house and sealed it off. The bodies of Pritilata Chakraborty and her daughter were found beneath the stairwell leading to the roof, Ganapati Chakraborty’s body was found to the left of the rooftop door, and the boy’s body was found under a bed on the second floor. A mosquito net had been set up over Ganapati Chakraborty’s bed, suggesting he may have been getting ready for bed, and the boy’s school ID card was found on a nearby table.
Sanatan Chakraborty, deputy commissioner of the Rangpur Metropolitan Police’s detective branch, who was at the scene that night, said each body showed marks of injury to the neck. “The full picture will become clear once the inquest report comes in, but our preliminary assessment is that all four were strangled,” he said. “Each had a gamchha or nylon rope wrapped around the mouth.”
Nazmul Kadir, officer-in-charge of Kotwali police station, said Ganapati Chakraborty’s older brother, Gopinath Chakraborty, has filed a case against unidentified suspects in connection with the killings.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report