Two people have been arrested over the gruesome murder of trader Ashraful Haque, whose dismembered body was found stuffed into plastic drums near the High Court intersection in Dhaka.
While both RAB and the police confirm the arrests, they offer sharply different accounts of what led to the killing - one pointing to an elaborate extortion scheme, the other to a volatile love triangle.
Police arrested Jorejul Islam, 39, from Dhaka, while RAB detained Shamima Akter, 33, from Cumilla on Friday evening. The arrests were disclosed at separate press conferences on Saturday.
At a morning briefing, RAB-3 Commanding Officer Lieutenant Colonel Faizul Arefin said Ashraful had been "lured into a trap" as part of a plan to extort Tk 10 lakh before he was murdered.
According to RAB, Shamima and Jorejul had been in a romantic relationship for more than a year and conspired together to carry out the crime.
On 11 November, Jorejul and Ashraful travelled to Dhaka from Rangpur. The following day, the two men - along with Shamima - rented a house in the Shonir Akhra area, Arefin said.
As part of the plot, Shamima allegedly gave Ashraful a sedative-laced drink, after which the suspects recorded a compromising video intended for extortion. The video has since been recovered from her mobile phone.
RAB said that when Ashraful became fully unconscious on the afternoon of 12 November, Jorejul tied him with rope, sealed his mouth with scotch tape, and struck him repeatedly with a hammer, killing him.
The next morning, the pair bought two plastic drums and tools from a nearby market. Jorejul then used a cleaver to dismember the body, placing the pieces inside the drums before abandoning them in a CNG-run auto-rickshaw near the High Court area.
RAB recovered Ashraful's blood-stained Panjabi-Pajama along with the rope and tape used in the murder.
However, a starkly different motive was presented at a separate briefing by Dhaka Metropolitan Police's Detective Branch (DB).
Additional Commissioner Md Shafiqul Islam said the killing resulted from a love triangle involving Jorejul, Shamima and Ashraful. According to DB, Jorejul, an expatriate worker in Malaysia, had met Shamima more than three years earlier through a mobile app, and the two developed a relationship. After he returned to Bangladesh about six weeks ago, their communication intensified.
