Meghalaya cops to push back Salahuddin if court orders

Indian police will push back arrested BNP leader Salahuddin Ahmed to Bangladesh if court orders, said a top Meghalaya police official.

“We will produce Salahuddin before court after the hospital authorities where he is undergoing treatment release him,” said Vivek Syiem, superintendent of police (city) of East Khasi Hills of Meghalaya.

Talking to The Daily Star over his mobile phone around 6:20pm, the police officer said upon the court order they will push Salahuddin back to Bangladesh authorities.

Asked, he said they have already communicated with the Bangladesh High Commission in Delhi and the country’s mission in Kolkata to this end.

Replying to a query, Vivek said he thinks there is not much procedural complexities regarding pushing Salahuddin back to Bangladesh. 

He added that Salahuddin’s wife will be able to meet her husband once she arrives there.

On Salahuddin’s physical condition, M Kharkrang, SP, East Khasi Hills, told The Daily Star over telephone around 6:10pm that although the Bangladeshi senior political leader seems okay, the hospital authorities are yet to release him.

He said they will interrogate Salahuddin upon his release from the hospital on his trespass into Shillong.

Around two months after going missing from a house in Uttara of Dhaka, Salahuddin was found on Monday evening in Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya.

A Shillong police patrol spotted him loitering in Golf Link area of the tourist city. As he could not produce any documents and also appeared to be “mentally unbalanced”, police arrested him for trespassing and admitted him to Meghalaya Institute of Mental Health and Neurological Science.

As doctors there certified that he was mentally well, Salahuddin was later shifted to Shillong Civil Hospital for better treatment.

It still remains a mystery how and when Salahuddin, joint secretary general of the BNP, landed in Shillong after he was allegedly picked up by plainclothes law enforcers on March 10.

Talking to The Daily Star over the phone yesterday, an Indian journalist, who briefly spoke to Salahuddin at the mental hospital, said the BNP leader claimed a group of unknown people had picked him up from Dhaka.

Salahuddin told the journalist that he was unaware how he had ended up in Shillong on Monday.

Police later registered a case against him under the Foreigners' Act.

It was Salahuddin's wife Hasina Ahmed who first informed the media that her husband was found in Shillong and was receiving treatment at a hospital there.

Over the last two months, Salahuddin's family members and his party repeatedly claimed that plainclothes law enforcers, including Rab personnel, had picked up the BNP leader.

Law enforcers, however, denied picking him up. There was no trace of Salahuddin since then.