Parveen asked me last night if I ever thought about any other girl in my life. I said, I didn’t. But sometimes I think about a girl. That girl’s name is also Parveen. Sometimes I remember the girl when I am out of my mind or suffering from emptiness. I remember, a longing look. But there is no romantic attachment involved. Maybe he remembers because the girl has a connection with emptiness. Whether Parveen was convinced or not, it was not clear in the dim light. But he said, he wants to know the incident. Then I started telling him the story. It was the third story I told him that night. We decided to spend the whole night in full bed talking. I was telling the story of my police career. I was selectively narrating those incidents which would impress Parveen. The stranger with whom she has decided to spend her whole life may not wear a regular police uniform, but she may realize that her life is no less varied and no less interesting. The problem is that in telling any story about catching a criminal, it is often difficult to avoid details of the crime. Most human crimes are brutal. Their description is incompatible with the sweetness of Basrarat. That’s why I was trying to tell the stories without the details of the crime. But while telling the story of Parveen’s abduction, I could not keep this sense of discretion and began to tell the bride a horror story so casually that I did not notice when she pressed her ears to the pillow to avoid the cold. By the time I started telling Parveen’s story, it was long past midnight, but it was still early morning. By that time, the rumors of the wedding have settled down. The complicated calculation and negotiation that goes on in every marriage house about the arrangement of the bridegroom’s relatives and the bridegroom’s relatives is also over. The elderly are asleep. The younger ones are starting to relax after various murders. Cooks and decorators are setting up tables for sleeping amid the lingering scent of ginger and ghee by the pandal light in the courtyard. Reached by Parveen while investigating the abduction of a girl named Marina, I began. Marina’s house is in a Jheel area called ‘Beraid’ at one end of Dhaka city. Although housing projects are booming around, the Fakirkhali area is still a bit of a village. One or two paddy fields can also be seen. The place had not yet come under the City Corporation. After passing matriculation from Marina Fakirkhali High School, she enrolled in Intermediate at Mahanagar Degree College, Badda, a couple of miles away. He used to come down to Kuril Bishwa Road at a tempo from in front of Nila market in Berai. Then he would go to his college in Madhyabadda by bus.
Marina went missing in March while in her second year. He left for college and never came back. The case came to our DB four months after she went missing. I was recently removed from the police station and placed in the DB. The burden of investigation fell on a senior officer named Khairul. He was handling three cases single-handedly. I followed his motorcycle around Dhaka city. Provide him with official support.
Since the other two cases were somewhat political, SI Khairul’s main focus was on them. The investigation into Marina’s disappearance was not progressing well. As a result, I started my own investigation, partly due to pressure from Marina’s father, and within a week I got several leads. The investigation was not too difficult. In particular, I didn’t need much speed to trace the phone call records and identify one named Omar Farooq. The man runs a travel agency called ‘Golden Valley’ in North Badda. Once there was good business. A lot of stuff. Later, the business fell due to disputes between the partners over ownership.
Omar Farooq maintains regular contact with Marina. Called him often. Some calls were made even after 12 pm. A month before her disappearance, Marina was regularly seen commuting from Kuril to her college in Madhyabadda in a private car instead of taking a bus. Several shopkeepers at Kuril Bus Stand and two classmates from Mahanagar College confirm this. The off-white private car of X-Corolla model manufactured in 2005 was registered in the name of Omar Farooq in 2012.
Omar Farooq, 42, a married father of three, was arrested. The court remanded him for five days. Sitting on a wooden chair under an 800-watt hooded electric lamp in the interrogation cell on the second floor of our DB office in the shade of a Gagan Shirish tree on Minto Road, Omar Farooq cracked midway through the fourth day of cross-examination. He starts confessing everything.
In an almost bookish tone, almost reading a newspaper article, he describes how, lured by love and lured by a scholarship to a foreign university, he lured Marina to a secret house he rented on the top floor of a two-storey house in Shahjahanpur, and three rooms in that house. After being raped 11 times, she was killed by stabbing her throat. Then he carried the body in the boot of his X-Corolla car and buried it inside a shalban in Sreepur.
It took Omar Farooq some momentum to find that place in Shalban and show it to us. Five months later, the body melted and mixed with the ground. Marina’s father identified the girl by looking at the clothes. We keep the sample for DNA test and hand over the body to the father.
In the interrogation cell Omar Farooq described his crime without any remorse and in great detail. He was giving unnecessary details even when not asked. Besides myself and SI Khairul, SP Wahid was there then. He walked out midway. I heard later, he vomited.
One thing SI Khairul and I were convinced about Omar Farooq by his ability to give such a candid account of his crimes – the man is out of character.
The court granted us an additional two-day remand. At the very last stage of the remand on the seventh day, Omar Farooq admitted what both Khairul Bhai and I suspected, but did not tell each other openly. Marina is not Omar Farooq’s only victim. In the 18 months before Marina’s murder, he killed 4 more girls and then 1 more in the same manner. These six murders took place in the second floor flat of an abandoned two-storey house in Shahjahanpur with six different but almost identical sharp knives. Omar Farooq is a serial killer. First and only in Bangladesh. For the next three days, we participated in the grand yajna to dig up five more bodies from different places in Shalban, Gazipur. Among them is a fresh, almost intact body. The other four, needless to say, are just bones. Omar Farooq’s Smriti Photographic. He gave detailed descriptions not only of each murder, but of each victim. Apart from Dhaka, he collected these victims from different districts. For this reason, six cases of disappearance one after the other in two years have not been recorded separately in the police register. The victims range from a school teacher in Manikganj to the floor-in-charge of a garment factory in Rupganj. Their age also varied. We got the details about the victims from Omar Farooq. I had to deliver the information about the body to the victim’s house. The discomfort of showing up at a missing person’s house after a long time and breaking the bad news to his relatives and sitting in the living room in front of their blank stares became painful for me. The fourth girl killed by Omar is Parveen. Parveen passed in Geography from Kazi Nazrul College and worked at an outlet in Gopi Bagh. Two years before that incident, she married a boy named Parag, who used to sit at the counter at the same outlet in Arang. Their marriage causes the pollen to be transferred to the science lab outlet. Both lived in a two-room rented house in Chapra Masjid area of Azimpur. They had no children. While listening to Omar Farooq’s words about Parveen, I had a flash of thought that I might have spoken to this girl in black kameez and ocher pajama and veil several times before. Because, I went to that outlet in Arang several times. I bought clothes. Maybe that girl showed me shirt or bed sheet. Maybe I asked him which way is the trial room. Marina’s body was first picked up in the presence of her father. But we picked up the skeletons of the remaining five victims ourselves. I went to the houses of the four victims one by one and informed them. Finally, I went to Parveen’s house. I was not given the bad news when I went there. Parveen is the girl who knocks on the door on the right side of the fourth floor of a six-storey building adjacent to Chapra Mosque in Azimpur. He went missing for three days 16 months ago. is back He does not remember what happened in those three days, where he was. Parveen was saying these words while standing at the door, leaving the door half open. At the end, Parag stood behind his wife and asked why I had come. I didn’t say anything. Just saying, my visit was part of a routine check before the missing incident of 16 months ago was recorded in the archive. They looked at me with half-believing suspicion. Before leaving that building and going up to the main road, I looked back and saw Parveen standing on the balcony of the fourth floor looking at me. There is no way to understand from a distance, but why I felt that there was a strong desire in his two helpless eyes. I’m sure I didn’t imagine this look.