Salahuddin wants to return home (video)

BNP leader Salahuddin Ahmed, now undergoing treatment at a Shillong hospital in Indian Meghalaya state, today said he wants to return home.

“Bangladesh is my country. Why will I not return to my own country?” Salauddin told reporters when he was being taken to the main building of Shillong Civil Hospital for a CT scan from the ward of under-trial prisoners. Journalists from Bangladesh and India present at the hospital told The Daily Star.

Salahuddin said his return to Bangladesh is uncertain due to the letter of request that Interpol’s National central Bureau in Dhaka sent to its New Delhi office on May 14 to arrest him.

“I did not commit any crime,” said the joint secretary general of BNP, who was found in Shillong two months after he went missing from Dhaka.

“Some people left me at Shillong blind-folded. I myself went to the local police station with the help of a local,” Salahuddin said.

“It wasn’t police who had captured me,” he added.

His wife Hasina Ahmed, who left Dhaka last night, reached Shillong around 7:00pm (Bangladesh Time), BNP’s Assistant Office Secretary Abdul Latif Jony told The Daily Star.

Jony added it will take around an hour for Hasina to complete necessary procedure to meet her husband at the hospital.

The hospital authorities carried out the CT scan, a day after Salahuddin's party colleague Abdul Latif Jony claimed that the ailing BNP leader seems to be suffering memory loss.

Jony went to Shillong on Friday to met Salahuddin.

Meghalaya police arrested Salahuddin on May 11 as he was “hanging around aimlessly” in Golf Links area of Shillong after nearly two months of his disappearance from a residence at the capital's Uttara on March 10.

Since he had no valid papers, identity proof or travel permit with him, Shillong police arrested and booked him under the Foreigners Act.

The BNP and Salahuddin's family members had been claiming that law enforcers picked him up, an allegation denied by the law enforcers and the government.

In cases of trespass like the one involving Salahuddin, police usually send the intruder back to his home country upon court order, Vivek Syiem, superintendent of police (city) of East Khasi Hills in Indian state of Meghalaya, said on May 13.

There wouldn't be much procedural complexities in sending the arrested Bangladeshi politician back home, Syiem said.