Sqc Verdict Leak
ICT employee arrested
Defence lawyer’s computer seized
The Detective Branch of police on Friday arrested an employee of the International Crimes Tribunal for his alleged involvement in leaking parts of the draft judgement on Salauddin Quader Chowdhury. The detectives claimed that they primarily cracked the clue to the leaking of parts of the draft verdict. The International Crimes Tribunal 1 on October 2 pronounced the judgement sentencing Bangladesh Nationalist Party lawmaker Salauddin to death on charge of genocide and crimes against humanity committed in Chittagong during the 1971 war of independence.
Just after the pronouncement of the verdict, Salauddin’s family and his defence lawyer AKM Fakhrul Islam claimed that they had found the judgement on different websites two days before
it was delivered. They also claimed that the judgement was prepared by the law ministry.
Dhaka Metropolitan Police joint commissioner Monirul Islam at a briefing at the DMP media centre on Friday said that in the preliminary interrogation, arrested tribunal employee Nayan Ali admitted that he leaked the draft judgement being bribed by an assistant of Salauddin’s defence lawyer AKM Fakhrul Islam.
Detective Branch inspector Fazlur Rahman on Friday filed a case with Shahbagh police station accusing Nayan, another tribunal employee Farukh Hossain and Fakhrul’s assistant Mehedi Hassan and some unknown of leaking the parts of the draft judgement.
Both Nayan and Farukh are the muster roll employees of the tribunal.
On October 2, tribunal registrar AKM Nasiruddin Mahmud filed a general diary with the same police station in connection with the leaking.
A team of detectives raided Fakhrul’s chamber at Kakrail in the city on Friday afternoon and seized two central processing units, a printer and a certified copy of the judgement against Salauddin as part of the investigation, Detective Branch deputy commissioner Krishna Pada Ray told New Age.
Fakhrul alleged that the detective team broke open the door of his chamber at 2:30pm in his absence and carried on the raid for about two hours.
Monirul said that Nayan leaked the draft judgement in phases beginning on September 15 and Farukh had introduced Mehedi to Nayan.
He said that Nayan, although a cleaner, had access to tribunal’s computer as he had composed some letters of the tribunal in absence of the stenographer and Farukh and Mehedi used Nayan to leak the draft judgement.
The detectives on October 2 seized the computer of the tribunal in which the judgement was drafted.
Monirul said that the computer had no internet connection and the draft judgement was leaked through a flash drive.
The leaked draft judgement was in Microsoft Word file in the tribunal’s computer.
The accused persons could manage to leak 165 pages of the draft judgement in phases, Monirul said.
He, however, did not say on which day Nayan lastly leaked the draft judgement, saying that they would not disclose the date for the sake of proper investigation.
Monirul said that Nayan admitted that Mehedi allured him to give a file from the computer but he ‘mistakenly’ gave the first instalment of the draft judgement to Mehedi.
Mehedi then threatened Nayan for giving the rest parts of the draft judgement and warned him of ‘serious trouble’ if it was disclosed that he had already leaked the ‘tribunal’s judgement,’ the detective official said.
He said that they assumed that the draft judgement was sent to a foreign country through email attachment from where the Microsoft Word file was transformed into a Portable Document Format file and was uploaded on the websites after 11:00pm on September 30.
The detective official claimed that the computer which was used to transform the MS Word file to PDF file had no Bangla writing option and the Bangla part of the draft judgement became unreadable in the copies available on the websites.
Asked whether they suspect Salauddin’s family for leaking the draft verdict, Monirul said that the matter was under their ‘active consideration’ as the family was beneficiary of the leak out.
-With New Age input
