Tutor the killer
Fourteen-year-old Sajal Chandra Majumdar, whose body was found in a sack in Matikata Bazar area, Dhaka Cantonment last week, had been killed by a teacher of his.
Sabuj Sutradhar, 25, admitted killing Sajal, a class-VIII student of Uttar Kafrul High School, after police arrested him in the capital’s Ibrahimpur yesterday, said Kazi Wazed Ali, officer-in-charge of Kafrul Police Station.
Sabuj also told police that Sajal had been a witness to an affair between him and a married woman who lived in the same building where the boy had lived and that was why he had been killed.
Sajal used to take tuition classes at the coaching centre run by Sabuj at Ibrahimpur, Wazed said quoting Azharul Haque, chairperson of the school.
He had gone missing in the evening of August 28. Around 10:30pm, Sajal’s father Shyamol Chandra Majumdar received a call when the abductor demanded Tk 50,000 ransom to let his son go free unhurt, Wazed said quoting Shyamol.
Shyamol filed a general diary with Kafrul Police Station the next morning and submitted the phone number of the unknown caller to the police.
Wazed told The Daily Star that he himself called the number in that afternoon and introduced him as Sajal’s uncle. The person from the other side demanded Tk 2.5 lakh in return for the boy’s life. Wajed agreed to this and insisted on being given the proof that Sajal was alive and unhurt.
Though a child identifying him as Sajal spoke to Wajed and Sajal’s parents, the three could not be sure if the voice belonged to Sajal, he added.
However, in that very morning on August 29, Matikata police recovered the body of a boy who was later identified as Sajal.
Through an investigation, police found out that the number belonged to Sabuj, and traced him in Feni. The arrest was made after he came back to Ibrahimpur.
Sabuj told police that he had abducted the boy and fed him with fruit juice mixed with five sedatives. He later in the day of the abduction suffocated Sajal to death, put the body in a sack and dropped it at Matikata Bazar, police sources said.
So Sajal was dead before Sabuj negotiated the ransom with the uncle-in-disguise, Wajed, and his parents over the phone.
Sabuj admitted it before police.
Azharul Haque, the school’s chairperson, also said Sabuj killed the boy as he was a witness to the extra-marital relationship.
Sabuj identified the woman as Preeti. He also said Preeti had helped him do the abduction and murder.
However, when contacted by The Daily Star, Preeti, who is now in police custody with her two-month-old child, denied the accusation.
“I had no idea about Sajal’s abduction, and I was not involved in the murder.”
She added that she used to contact Sabuj because “he was a friend of mine and more importantly, because he owed me Tk 1 lakh 90 thousand.
Preeti claimed she had given him the money in several phases to invest it in businesses and that Sabuj was suppossed to pay her back with interests.
She said, “Sabuj used a photograph of us, taken three years back on the day we first met” to establish that she was having an illicit relationship with him.
But police said they had found several photographs of the two in a raid at the arrestee’s house.
Meanwhile, the body has been brought back to Dhaka Medical College morgue for autopsy to verify Sabuj’s confession.
Local people will bring out a procession Saturday morning from Uttar Kafrul High School, protesting the gruesome murder, said the school’s chairperson.
-With The Daily Star input
