Staff Reporter:
Detective Branch (DB) of Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) arrested 23 members of an alleged gang that illegally made birth certificates, fake national identity cards and passports for Rohingyas and notori-ous criminals in the country.
Three Rohingyas, two members of Ansar Force and brokers are included among the 23 arrestees.
Seventeen passports, 13 fake NIDs, five computers, three printers, 24 mobile phones and hundreds of documents related to the making of passports were recovered from their possessions.
Divided into three parts, the arrestees used to get the fake birth certificates of criminals and Rohingya through the computer operators of various Union Parishad chairmen of Rajshahi, Rangpur, Narayanganj, Mymensingh, Shariatpur and Gopalganj. Later, he would make passports with this information to the Rohingyas.
The DB police arrested three Rohingya women and men, ten Bangladeshis with passports and computers conducting raids at Agargaon, Mohammadpur, Jatrabari, Badda in the capital on February 23.
Later, based on their information, the detectives carried out drives in different areas of Cox’s Bazar, Tangail and Dhaka on February 25. Two Ansar members, and eight middle men of the Rohingya and Bangladeshi brokers syndicate gang, were arrested during the drives.
The arrested Rohingyas were identified as Umme Chhalima Chhamira, Morijan and Md Rashidul. Mid-dle men of Rohingya were known as Ayub Ali and Md. Mostakim. Ansar members were identified as Md. Jamsedul Islam and Md. Raihan. Bengali brokers were Raju Sheikh, Shaon Hossain alias Niloy, Feroz Hossain, Tushar Mia. The broker members of Agargaon, Mohammadpur and Uttara areas are Shahjahan Sheikh, Shariful Alam, Zobair Molla, Shimul Sheikh, Ahmed Hossain, Masud Alam, Abdul Alim, Masud Rana, Fazle Rabbi Shawon, Rajab Kumar Das Dipto, Al-Amin and Md Sohag.
Briefing reporters at DMP media centre on Monday, Additional Commissioner (DB) of the DMP Mo-hammad Haroon Or-Rashid disclosed it. DB Lalbagh Division DC (promoted to the post of Additional DIG) Moshiur Rahman was also present.
During the briefing, the DB chief said that the syndicate members used to make birth certificates, NID cards and passports for Rohingya children, women and men in exchange of thousands of taka. The cycle has been doing this in three parts. A group of them brought Rohingyas from Cox’s Bazar, Bandarban, Khagrachari to Dhaka. Another group makes birth certificate, NID cards for them. Finally, the other group arranges for money deposit, biometrics and photo taking through Ansar members in various re-gional passport offices including Dhaka.
He said, they usually charge Tk 5,000 to 12,000 for the birth certificate within six hours. Primarily they admitted that they used to charge 25 thousand taka to get NID within three days and 1 lakh 20 thousand taka to make passport.
The relevant soft documents, delivery slips of hundreds of passports were found in the mobile phones of the arrested brokers. Out of which 143 passports were made for Rohingyas in the last three months. The gang members also admitted to issuing passports to Rohingyas, Bangladeshi criminals under different names and addresses since 2019.
The top officer of the DMP’s DB said that the arrested people used the use addresses of Dhaka, Rajshahi, Narayanganj, Mymensingh, Rangpur, Shariatpur, Gopalganj and Barisal districts to create birth certifi-cates and NIDs and then make passports based on those documents.
Bangladesh has Rohingya database , digital birth certificate datas and smart NID data bank where various information including biometrics, images are stored. However, without any verification of this infor-mation, anyone can submit biometrics to deposit money through brokers and take photos for passports at the passport office on the basis of required documents. But it is possible to identify Bangladeshi nation-als and Rohingyas immediately by scrutinising Rohingya data, digital birth certificate data and smart NID data before making passports.
