Zoha still missing

Family members of IT expert Tanveer Hassan Zoha have been passing their days in uncertainty since he went missing in the early hours on Thursday from the capital's Dhaka Cantonment area.

Tanveer's uncle Mahbubul Alam said the home minister was aware of Tanveer going missing and commented about it before the media while the family also went to police stations and sought help.

“Yet none could tell anything specific,” he told The Daily Star over the phone.

Mahbubul, a former deputy director general of state-run Bangladesh Television, said they could not plan anything concrete to find Tanveer. Frustration led them to avoid going to the police station later on, he said.

Tanveer's ailing mother Maksuda Hassan's health has deteriorated as she was fainting every now and then, he said. His wife, Kamrunnahar, a physician, sought the prime minister's intervention in rescuing him.

The 32-year-old information technology expert was allegedly picked up by plainclothes men around 1:00am while returning to his Kalabagan house with a friend on a CNG-run auto-rickshaw.

Following the incident, the family went to three police stations to file a general diary but the police allegedly refused to accept it.

Referring to the home minister's comments, Mahbubul said if Tanveer was involved in any criminal offense, he should be nabbed and produced before a court.

Asked whether law enforcers picked up Tanveer (in connection with the probe into the Bangladesh Bank reserve heist), Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal on Thursday told journalists that he could not tell for sure at that moment.

He, however, said Tanveer might have been picked up for the sake of the investigation.

Tanveer's abduction came a couple of days after he talked to the media over the cyber heist of the Bangladesh Bank reserve.

In media reports, he was identified as an official of the ICT division of the ministry of posts, telecommunications and information technology. The ICT division, however, in a statement dismissed reports of his affiliation with it.

Tanveer is an official of an IT-related non-governmental organisation that had a project with the ICT division. The contract of the project expired recently.

Dhaka Metropolitan Police Deputy Commissioner (media) Maruf Hossain Sorder said they could not say anything about an offense unless a complaint was recorded.