After the murders, a mobile phone was looted. It then changed hands one after another — eight times in all — sometimes sold for 500 taka, sometimes for 700. Unable to crack the case, investigators went looking for that phone nearly a year later and were led straight to those who had planned the killings, solving the mystery of the much-discussed double murder of a mother and son in Baghmara, Rajshahi.
On the night of November 23, 2014, Aklima Bewa, 55, and her son Jahid Hasan, 28, were killed with sharp weapons at their home in Deula village of Baghmara upazila. The next day, Aklima’s other son, Dulal Uddin, filed a murder case at Baghmara police station.
The case was initially investigated by Baghmara police, who arrested five people — but it later emerged that none was involved. A year later, the Police Bureau of Investigation (PBI) took over and focused on Aklima’s mobile phone, which had gone missing after the murders. By then it had changed hands eight times and reached a man in Netrokona. That phone became the key piece of evidence that turned the whole investigation around.
The PBI found that the victim’s phone had been taken from the scene and sold from one person to the next; investigators began tracing it by its IMEI number.
According to the PBI, Aklima had a long-running feud with her cousin-in-law Abul Hossain Master — a local village elder — and also with her neighbour Habibur Rahman over the drug trade. It was over these feuds that the two men planned to have the mother and son killed by hired assassins. Habibur Rahman, who took the phone from the scene, was directly involved in the plan.
The PBI said seven people were arrested after reviewing the sequence of the phone’s exchanges, among them Abul Hossain Master and Habibur Rahman.
PBI chief and Additional Inspector General of Police Mostafa Kamal said the phone was the crucial clue in the double-murder case. It was looted after the killings and passed through eight hands, but by following the sequence of those exchanges it was finally possible to solve the murder. The investigation is detailed in a book titled “Investigation of Unidentified Bodies and Clueless Murder Cases,” published by PBI headquarters in January this year.
According to the PBI, Habibur Rahman was responsible for arranging the hired killers — five were recruited from various areas of Durgapur upazila in Rajshahi. Under the plan, on the night of November 23, 2014, Abul Hossain Master led the hired killers from 18 kilometres away to the scene on a motorcycle, with the killers following him to the front of Aklima’s house.
The PBI said Aklima and her son Jahid Hasan were hacked to death with sharp weapons between 8:30 and 9:15 p.m., while another man kept watch over the motorcycle outside. After the murders, the killers fled quickly with Aklima’s phone.
After a long investigation and trial, the court delivered its verdict in September 2019. It sentenced three people to death — Abul Hossain Master, Habibur Rahman and Abdur Razzak of Debipur in Durgapur, a sacked BGB member and leader of the hired-killer group. The court handed life sentences to Abdullah Al Kafi and Ruhul Amin of Shyampur in Durgapur, Rustam Ali of Khidrakashipur village and Monirul Islam, alias Monir, of Khidralakshmipur village.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report