Gazipur Rail Sabotage: 2 BNP Affiliate Leaders Arrested

The police have arrested two leaders of the Jubo Dal and Chhatra Dal over a sabotage incident in Gazipur targeting the Mohanganj Express train.

The arrestees have confessed that Jubo Dal President Sultan Salahuddin Tuku was the main planner and coordinator of the incident, said Md Asaduzzaman, head of the Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime unit of Dhaka Metropolitan Police, at a press briefing on Monday (December 25).

Jubo Dal’s Ikhtiar Rahman Kabir and Chhatra Dal’s Emon Hossain were arrested in Dhaka’s Jatrabari area on Sunday, police said.

The law enforcers recovered some equipment from them, all of which were new. Ikhtiar was involved in the sabotage of at least eight buses in Dhaka, Asaduzzaman said.

On Dec 13, seven coaches of the Dhaka-bound Mohanganj Express were derailed in the early morning hours as criminals uprooted the connecting plates from a section of the Joydebpur-Mymensingh railway line.

One person was killed, and several others, including the locomaster of the train, sustained severe injuries.

Asaduzzaman said that public transport on long-distance routes was curtailed as a result of several hartals and blockades called by the BNP on Oct 28. However, the BNP programmes had no impact on the railways. Due to this, Tuku planned to sabotage a railway line in order to create widespread panic and cause massive loss of life.