Bangladesh: Student leader arrested on extortion charge

Dhaka: Bangladesh police on Friday arrested a student leader on extortion charges, nearly a week after taking into custody five of his comrades, including two prominent figures of Students against Discrimination, in the same case. The Students against Discrimination (SAD) had led last year’s mass protest campaign that eventually toppled prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League regime on August 5.

“Our detective branch arrested Jane Alam Apu from Dhaka’s Wari area. Apu is the sixth accused to be arrested in the same case of extortion,” joint commissioner of police Mohammad Nasirul Islam said. On July 26, police arrested five student leaders, including SAD figures Ibrahim Hossain Munna and Abdur Razzak Riyad, sparking a nationwide uproar. Their arrest prompted the SAD to expel them immediately and dissolve all its units excepting the central committee.

Munna was SAD’s Dhaka city convenor while Riyad was the convenor of the platform’s Private Universities Committee. According to police, the group first went to former lawmaker of now disbanded Awami League Shammi Ahmed’s residence at posh Gulshan area in the capital on July 17 and demanded Taka 50 lakh from her husband Abu Zafar since his ‘fascist collaborator wife’ was not at the house.

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Taka 50 lakh extorted

On that day, they extorted Taka 10 lakh from him and on July 26 they went again to the house to collect the remaining Taka 40 lakh when police appeared at the scene and arrested them responding to a call from the family. The police action came as CCTV footage showing the extortionists receiving cash in the guest room of a residence went viral on social media. The SAD had spearheaded the violent street movement leading to Hasina's ouster.

Three days after she fled to India, Muhammad Yunus took over as the head of the interim government on August 8. Two of the representatives of the SAD platform are Yunus' cabinet members. The SAD had later turned into a political outfit, the National Citizen Party (NCP), in February this year.

Following the incident, former SAD spokesperson Umama Fatema, who recently resigned from the platform, in a video post on social media alleged that corruption had gripped the platform’s leaders and that the 'July Uprising' “has been made a ‘money-making machine’.”

Fatema, who was one of the key coordinators of the student-led protest last year, said she was “used like a tissue paper or a doormat” and claimed all key decisions came from Hare Road, where the government's advisers reside.