Rupa Khatun

Police yesterday charged five transport workers for gang raping and killing law student Rupa Khatun on a running bus on August 25.

Sub-Inspector Kaiyum Khan Siddique, investigation officer of the case and also in-charge of Araonkhola Police Outpost in Madhupur, submitted the charge sheet before the Judicial Magistrate's Court in Tangail in the evening, said Mahbub Alam, superintendent of Tangail police.

The accused were: bus helpers Shamim, 26, Akram, 35, and Jahangir, 20, driver Habibur, 45, and bus supervisor Safar Ali alias Gendu, 55.

Charges of rape, murder, and hiding the body and abetting the hiding of the body were brought against them, he said.

A total of 32 people, including police, doctors and government officials, were made witnesses in the charge sheet.

The bus, her mobile phone, her purse, spectacles, and bloodstained clothes of Rupa were mentioned as evidence.

Police on August 25 recovered an unidentified body of a woman near Tangail-Mymensingh road in Tangail's Madhupur upazila. Following an autopsy, the body was buried at the Tangail central graveyard the next day.

Seeing the news in the media, Rupa's family members went to Madhupur Police Station on August 28 and identified her from the photographs of the victim's body.

The next day, law enforcers picked up five employees of the bus at Madhupur. The arrestees during interrogation admitted their involvement in the crime, police sources said.

The Senior Judicial Magistrate's Court in Tangail on August 29 and 30 recorded their confessional statements and sent them to jail.

Following a court order, police on August 31 exhumed Rupa's body and handed it over to her family. The victim was later buried at her village in Sirajganj's Tarash upazila.

Saiful Islam Khan, resident medical officer at Tangail General Hospital, submitted the autopsy report to the Tangail civil surgeon on September 12 mentioning that Rupa was raped before being murdered.