Editorial
Abduction handling failure
Businessmen feel more insecure
As the abduction tale concerning Chittagong business magnate Jamaluddin Ahmed spun into more-than-a-hundred-day saga, newer incidents of kidnapping have occurred in the port city. The mysterious failure to recover him or uncover his whereabouts -- precisely, whether he is still alive -- albeit raises the spectre of a higher incidence of kidnapping in the country. As part of the scenario, Abu Sayed, a top business executive of Dhaka was kidnapped in broad daylight on Friday as his car reached Tejgaon. His transport was hijacked along with him, a piece of well-plotted crime! Sayed's family members bought his freedom by paying ransom. Jamaluddin Ahmed's near and dear ones had purportedly given Tk 25 lakh to former Chittagong Metropolitan Police commissioner and officer-in-charge of Kotwali Police Station to secure Jamal's release from abductors. But the Chittagong magnate remains untraceable to this day. Now, at the end of the tether, after more than three months of agonising wait, Jamaluddin's wife Nazma Chowdhury has seen the Home Minister accompanied by her two sons with a hope flickering in her that her husband is 'still alive'. She has implored the minister to resume the manhunt, now in comatose. Significantly, ill-fated Jamal's wife says, the family knows the identities of the abductors and their godfather, adding that she would disclose the names to the Prime Minister when she met her. One wonders why the Chittagong police failed to draw on the information the family had! After the abduction ordeal the family has been through, their own lives are now being endangered by death threats. What a terrible misfortune has befallen the family. They need physical protection and that's what they have sought from the government. Nazma Chowdhury says her husband was kidnapped due to 'political rivalry, not for ransom'. And that is why obviously she is talking of godfather, whose name she wants to reveal to the prime minister. Whatever the truth, it's the government's duty to uncover the whole of it. Confusing signals about Jamaluddin's whereabouts, announcement overkill before undertaking a raid, mobile communication advantage tilting towards the kidnappers and botched up rescue operations -- all point to an unprecedented abduction handling debacle. Are we reaching the kidnapping incidence of a Columbian proportion?
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