Mobile court seizes 750kg of rotten dates
Staff Correspondent
A mobile court yesterday dumped nearly 750 kg of rotten dates in the river seized from the Badamtali wholesale fruits market, while hundreds of sacks filled with the date-expired fruits could not be destroyed due to lack of adequate manpower. The wholesalers association of the market, however, assured the mobile court that they would destroy all the date-expired and low quality dates from the market within one week, after the court warned them. "We gave up our operation as most of the dates in the market were rotten and of low quality. How much can we throw away," said Sarder Keramat Ali, the magistrate who led the mobile court. At first the mobile court found more than hundreds of sacks of low quality dates at the Desh Enterprise owned by Mridul Kumar Biswas and threw away a few sacks in the river. It also realised Tk 10,000 as fine from there. Then the court exacted Tk 5,000 from SS Enterprise of the same market after finding sacks of rotten dates. They also dumped some sacks in the river. This market caters to the needs of the whole country. A group of traders have been importing rotten dates from different Middle East countries, sources said. "They (the Middle-East countries) used to throw those dates away into the sea earlier, which some crooked Bangladeshi importers have been importing now as poultry feed," said a date trader. They then process the dates with oil to make them look glossy and then sell those mostly during the Ramadan, he said.
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