A Dhaka court on Tuesday acquitted all three accused of the charges brought against them for molesting Shawan Akhter Badhan on the Dhaka University campus on the night of December 31, 1999.
Metropolitan magistrate Mahedi Hasan Talukder pronounced the verdict in presence of the three accused—Khan Mohammad Mezbahul Haq Tutul, Chandan Kumar Ghosh alias Bhola, and Fazlul Haq Rassel. They are on bail since the initiation of the proceedings.
Of the three, Tutul and Chandan were outsiders while Rassel was a resident student of Shahidullah Hall of the Dhaka University.
In the verdict, the court observed that the prosecution had failed to prove the charges against the accused beyond reasonable doubt.
Although the court repeatedly asked law enforcers to produce complainant Badhan before it, the police failed to do so claiming they did not find her at her address.
According to the prosecution, on the night of December 31, 1999, some 10-12 youth had harassed Badhan and almost stripped her at Mlion Chattar on the premises of Teachers and Students Centre where she had gone for millennium celebration along with her three friends who were also assaulted and driven from the scene.
After being informed by the victim’s friends, the on-duty police rescued her from the hands of the unruly youths.
As the incident sparked off quite a sensation in the country, police allegedly forced Badhan to record a criminal case against the perpetrators who were identified in the photographs published in different national dailies on the following day.
Badhan, on January 6, 2000, filed a case with the Ramna police station and identified the three accused from newspaper photographs.
Police arrested eight people in this connection and the investigation officer, inspector Rezaul Karim of the detective branch, submitted a charge-sheet on May 14, 2000 against two outsiders—Tutul, Chandan and Rassel—discharging six others. A total of
27 people were made
witnesses.
But Chandan, who was also an activist of the Chhatra League, the student front of Awami League, was shown absconding in the charge-sheet.
