5 of a family found dead in N'ganj house

Five members of a family, including two children, were murdered in Narayanganj yesterday.  

Police found several stab wounds in the bodies and heads of Taslima Begum, 35, her son Shanto, 10, her daughter Sumaiya, 5, brother Morshedul, 22, and sister-in-law Lamia, 25.

The children were strangled to death while the grown ups had their throats slit.

Police said Taslima's sister-in-law Hazera Begum went to their home on the ground floor of a five-storey building in the city's Baburail area around 9:00pm.

She found the door locked from the outside and could not reach the inhabitants over the phone.

Suspecting something was wrong, she along with neighbours broke into the flat and saw the bodies and called in the law enforcers, said police.

Police reached the spot around 10:00pm and recovered the bodies.

The law enforcers picked up two relatives, including Lamia's husband Sharaif for questioning. Sharif works at a mobile phone shop in the capital. On Friday he went to Narayanganj.  

Additional Superintendent of Narayanganj Police Mohammad Zakaria told The Daily Star that the murders were probably committed some time between noon and early evening yesterday.

He said they found two of the bodies on a bed and the floor of one room and the other three were recovered from the floor of another room.

Residents of the adjoining flats told police that they did not hear any thing from the flat and that they had seen no one from the house since yesterday morning.    

Taslima's cousin Nayantara told our Narayanganj correspondent that homemaker Taslima used to sew to earn a little extra and her husband Shafiqul is a professional driver in Dhaka.

Nayantara said Taslima's mother Murshida Begum had failed to reach Taslima and Morshedul over the phone since evening.

Superintendent of Police of Narayanganj Khandakar Mahid Uddin said family feud and money could be the reasons behind the murders.

They were not ruling anything out, he said, adding that the killer or killers were possibly known to the victims.

Nothing inside the flat had any sign of damage and nothing seems to be stolen either.

During a spot visit around 10:00pm, hundreds of people were seen in front of the building. Police only let residents of the building in.

A team from the Criminal Investigation Department reached the spot around midnight to collect evidence.