The Detective Branch of police busted a fake currency note printing factory and arrested six people, including two women, with forged Bangladesh currency notes of different denominations and raw materials worth Tk 1 crore in raids on different areas of the capital on Thursday and Friday, the police said.
The detectives on a tip-off raided several areas, including Motijheel, Mugda and Mirpur in the capital and arrested them, they said.
Organised gangs were engaged in producing fake notes and releasing them in the markets through their network, the police said.
A top Bangladesh Bank official told New Age that the security agencies should step up their vigilance ahead of Eid as the state bank was going to release new currency notes in different denominations.
The detectives also unearthed a factory set up in an apartment rented by one of the accused, Mohammad Selim, at Mugda and seized raw materials used in making forged currency notes.
‘Organised gangs are also producing fake notes in Tk 500 denomination by using original notes of Tk 100 denomination,’ the DB (west) additional deputy commissioner, Mashiur Rahman, told reporters.
The six accused– Selim, 30, Jalal Uddin, 45, Abid, 42, Shahidul, 30, his wife Marium, 20, and Rozina, 30, were produced before the media.
Selim, a former garment waste trader, admitted that he had been engaged in faking currency notes for over one year after his business failed.
He said an engineer, who was a drug addict, had developed the software to print fake currency notes of Tk 1,000 and Tk 500 denominations.
Selim also said it was easy to convert the new original note of Tk 100 to the Tk 500 note by using the software.
Selim said they used to collect original notes of Tk 100 denominations and boiled them to remove the colour and reprint them in the factory set up at his house at Mugda.
Marium, another accused, said that they used to release the forged currency notes at different city markets through their own people.
Jalal said he was an auto-rickshaw driver and had been involved in the ‘business’ to make money.
The DB sent the six people to a Dhaka court with a prayer for a 10-day remand in police custody, the court sources said.
The state bank, meanwhile, launched an awareness campaign by publishing advertisements in newspapers detailing the security features of bank notes and requested citizens to hand over fake currency note makers, a BB official said.
-With New Age input
