Although the body parts are yet to be recovered, the woman and the butcher have been arrested along with two others following parallel probes by police in West Bengal and Dhaka.
A CID team from West Bengal will be visiting Bangladesh shortly while a team from Dhaka Metropolitan police is scheduled to visit Kolkata to piece together their findings in the murder of Azim, a three-time MP of the ruling Awami League party in Bangladesh.
Sharing details of the murder, investigators told The Indian Express Mohammad Akhtaruzzaman, a friend and business partner of Azim, is suspected to be the mastermind of the murder. Akhtaruzzaman, a US citizen of Bangladesh origin, had taken the New Town flat on rent and hired the woman, identified as Silasti Rehman, the butcher and two others to carry out the murder. He is believed to have fled India after the Azim’s killing in the flat on May 13, a day after the MP arrived in India for medical treatment.
Azim was reported missing since that day and the first input came on Wednesday following the arrest of the woman and two others in Bangladesh.
On the intervening night of Thursday and Friday, the West Bengal CID arrested Jihad Hawaldar, a 24-year-old illegal immigrant, who worked as a butcher in Mumbai.
Police said Akhtaruzzaman hired him and brought him to Kolkata two months ago. “We have arrested a suspect. He is the butcher specially brought from Mumbai by the other accused persons. He is an illegal immigrant living in Mumbai. His name is Jihad Hawaldar,” said a CID officer. Hawaldar is a resident of Barakpur under Digholia police station in Bangladesh.
CID officers claimed that Hawaldar has confessed that on the orders of Akhtaruzzaman, he and three other Bangladeshi nationals smothered the MP to death in the flat. Initial investigation reveals that he skinned the body, minced the flesh to destroy the identity and put the pieces in polythene packs. He also cut the bones into small pieces and packed them separately.
“They took the packets out of the flat, used various modes of transport and dumped them within Kolkata,” said a senior officer.
Hawaldar was produced in a Barasat court Friday. Although the CID sought his longer custody to recover the MP’s body and to track any other possible accomplice, the court granted his custody for 12 days.
The Dhaka Metropolitan Police also produced three arrested persons, including the woman suspect Silasti Rehman, in the Mahanagar sessions judge court there on Friday.
“Simul Bhuiyan alias Amanullah, Silasti Rehman and Tanvir Bhuiyan were produced in court and remanded in police custody for eight days. Interrogation of the accused persons will reveal the details. So far it is suspected that the murder conspiracy was hatched by Akhtaruzzaman alias Shahin, an old friend and business partner of the victim,” Md Abdus Sattar Dulal, additional public prosecutor, told The Indian Express over phone.
“Akhtaruzzaman conspired and employed the other accused persons to commit the crime. It is suspected that the woman was used as a bait to lure the victim to the flat. Akhtaruzzaman is absconding,” said Dulal.
It is learnt that Silasti is a resident of Tangail, while the other two accused are from Khulna.
Dhaka Metropolitan Police sources said MP Azim and Akhtaruzzaman were childhood friends and were believed to be business partners in gold. It is suspected that they fell out over money involved in the business.
The MP came to Kolkata on May 12 through Gede border in Nadia district around 2.40 pm and first went to Mondolpara lane in Baranagar to meet his friend Gopal Biswas, a gold trader. On May 13, he left Biswas’s house and was received by Amanullah – a murder convict who had served 20 years in a Bangladesh jail — and taken to the New Town apartment, where the other accused were waiting, police sources said.
The MP was murdered in the afternoon on May 13. According to the CID, the killers first made Azim unconscious using chloroform as he was cleaning his face near a washbasin and then smothered him to death.
His body was chopped and the pieces were put in small packets. The packets were put in a briefcase and a trolley bag. The killers then went to Krishnamati, 20 km from the flat, and disposed the packets.
The police have procured the CCTV footage of the apartment.