CUMILLA — Police have arrested a retired army warrant officer in connection with the 2016 murder of college student Sohagi Jahan Tonu in Cumilla, the first arrest in the case after a decade-long investigation.
The Police Bureau of Investigation arrested the suspect, Hafizur Rahman, at his home in Keraniganj in the capital on Wednesday morning, April 22. He was produced before the court of Cumilla Senior Judicial Magistrate Mominul Haque in the afternoon.
The court granted three days of remand. Rahman is a retired warrant officer of the Bangladesh Army.
Tariqul Islam, an inspector with the PBI’s Dhaka office and the investigating officer in the case, confirmed the arrest to reporters.
Tonu, a college student, went to give a private tutoring lesson at a house inside the Cumilla cantonment on the evening of March 20, 2016, and never returned home. Her body was later found in a wooded area near the cantonment’s power house. The next day, her father, Yar Hossain, filed a murder case against unknown assailants at Cumilla Kotwali Model Police Station.
The case was initially investigated by local police, the district detective branch (DB) and later the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), but no breakthrough emerged. The case file was transferred from the CID to the PBI’s Dhaka headquarters on October 21, 2020, on the orders of the police headquarters.
Inspector Mojibur Rahman of the PBI headquarters investigated the case for about four years. Since September 2024, Inspector Tariqul Islam has served as the case’s sixth investigating officer.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report