Kalyan Party secy general 'goes missing'

Bangladesh Kalyan Party Secretary General MM Aminur Rahman has been missing since Sunday, said the party chairman Maj Gen (rtd) Syed Muhammad Ibrahim.

“He went traceless after coming out of the party-office in Naya Paltan around 10:00pm on August 27,” Ibrahim told The Daily Star last night. 

Aminur's family members lodged a general diary with Paltan Police Station yesterday.

Police are looking into the matter, said Shiblee Noman, additional deputy commissioner (Motijheel) of Dhaka Metropolitan Police.

Meanwhile, BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia, in a statement, said Aminur was abducted while he was on the way to his home in Savar.

Bangladesh Kalyan Party is a component of the BNP-led 20-party alliance.

Khaleda slammed the government, saying, “Since Awami League's ascension to power, the country has turned into a ground for unbridled murders, abductions and enforced disappearances.”

She also alleged that the government was creating a “single-party social and political system” to cling to power.

BNP Secretary General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, meanwhile, claimed that over a thousand people have fallen victim to enforced disappearance since 2009.

“Incidents of enforced disappearance are on the rise and it rose sharply in last one week. This is a crime against humanity,” he told reporters at a press conference at the party's Nayapaltan office.

He also said it was the responsibility of the government to find the disappeared ones and return them to their families.

Fakhrul alleged that the government did not even observe the UN International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances as it kept committing the crime.

After showing a documentary on BNP leaders and activists allegedly abducted by law enforcers, the BNP leader, citing Ain O Salish Kendra data, said around 539 people fell victim to enforced disappearances from 2009 to last June.

“The actual figure is much higher,” he concluded.