Detective Branch of Dhaka Metropolitan Police on Friday arrested a convict in a case filed over the attack on the motorcade of the then leader of the opposition and incumbent Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in Satkhira nineteen years ago.
He was identified as Arifur Rahman Ranju, a former leader of BNP backd student organization Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal (JCD). He was JCD leader of a Satkhira college.
Additional Commissioner of DMP (DB) at a press conference on Saturday at DMP Media Centre disclosed it. He claimed that Ranju was arrested from city’ Hazaribagh area on Friday. He had led the attack on the then opposition leader.
Ranju was sentenced with 10 years’ imprisonment in the case.
On August 30 in 2002, Sheikh Hasina’s motorcade came under attack in front of the Kalaroa upazila parishad complex while she was on her way to Jashore from Satkhira after visiting a rape victim.
Aside from the bomb attack and vandalism of cars, gunshots were also fired at the then opposition leader.
In February 2021, Satkhira Chief Judicial Magistrate Court sentenced 50 leaders and activists of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and its front organisations, including BNP’s central leader and former lawmaker Habibul Islam Habib, to various jail terms for attacking the motorcade of Sheikh Hasina.
During the verdict, 34 of them were present in the courtroom. The others were on the run.