Muhammad Yasin, known as Sonamia, who was arrested and jailed under a death sentence meant for a different person named Ramjan Ali in a drug trafficking case, has been freed on bail from Cox’s Bazar District Jail.
Sonamia was released on Friday morning (August 14). He had been held since June 23, when he was arrested by RAB, imprisoned under a death sentence for a crime he did not commit.
His lawyer Abdul Mannan said the court, after reviewing Sonamia’s documents, confirmed that the Sonamia caught with a birth registration card was not the same person as the accused in the case — they are entirely separate individuals. The District and Sessions Judge, Muhammad Abdur Rahim, reviewed various reports and ordered Sonamia’s release with four conditions.
The four conditions are: submitting his national identity card to the police station, not changing his address, reporting to the court at specified intervals and keeping law enforcement informed of his whereabouts.
In 2020, a Detective Branch police operation led to the arrest of five people, including Ramjan Ali, with 190,000 yaba tablets. The second accused in the case was listed as “Sonamia,” a name taken from a photocopy of a birth registration certificate found on one of the individuals during the operation.
According to court documents, the investigating officer, then-DB police Inspector Manas Barua, filed a charge sheet in September 2020 stating that the name and address of the second accused could not be verified.
In June 2022, the person listed as “Sonamia” in the case obtained bail from the Cox’s Bazar District Judge Court. After his release, he went into hiding.
In February of this year, the court sentenced all five accused in the case, including “Sonamia,” to death. Following the verdict, RAB-15 arrested the current Sonamia — an entirely different person — on a warrant on June 23 and sent him to Cox’s Bazar District Jail.
After arriving in prison, questions about his identity emerged. Two to three days after being jailed, Sonamia filed a petition with the jail superintendent stating he was not the accused in the case. The superintendent forwarded the matter to the District Judge, who directed Cox’s Bazar Sadar police station to investigate and submit a report.
On July 2, police submitted a report to the court confirming that the person originally arrested with yaba tablets in 2020 and later released on bail, and the person arrested by RAB after the death sentence verdict, are not the same individual. The person originally arrested was identified as Ramjan, not Sonamia.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report