Four held for extorting money from bus owners

The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of police has arrested four members of a gang that stole bus documents to extort money from bus owners in Dhaka city.

The ring leader, Rakib alias Tufan, and his accomplices Shukur Ali, 28, Hridoy Hossain, 21, and Md Shamim, 25, were arrested from Bosila in Mohammadpur of the capital on Saturday.

Bus registration certificates, fitness certificates and tax tokens were recovered from them, said Imam Hossain, deputy inspector general of the CID, at a press briefing on Sunday.

During primary interrogation, the arrested admitted they had been stealing documents of buses of different transport companies, including Mirpur Link, Shikor Paribahan, Khajababa Paribahan, Projapoti Paribahan, and Robrob Paribahan, since 2020.

So far they have stolen papers of about 1,500 buses.

According to the CID, Tufan changed 56 sim cards in the last 28 days in the process of extorting money from the bus owners. 

The gang also used to steal mobile phones from different residential areas of Dhaka city. Using those phones, they made calls to bus owners and asked for Tk10,000 for each bus.

If the owners refused to pay the amount, the gang threatened setting their buses on fire or harming the bus drivers.

As the buses could not run on the roads without documents, the bus owners would contact the gang members over the mobile numbers provided by them to negotiate.

With negotiations, the amount was often reduced to Tk5,000 or Tk7,000 per vehicle, and upon payment, the gang returned some of the vehicle documents.

They also asked for monthly fees from owners of Mirpur Link, Khajababa and Bikolpo Paribahan as a precondition for returning the documents for the rest of the vehicles. 

To avoid the hassle of traffic cases and court proceedings, not to mention procuring fresh papers, the bus owners routinely met the gang's demands.

However, bus owners did report the matter to different police stations in Dhaka city and filed general diaries. 

In the last two-and-a-half years, more than 150 GDs were filed.

When that yielded no results, the bus owners then reported the matter to the CID.

The CID deputy inspector general said a case was filed with the Shah Ali police station in this regard.

He added that there were at least five more members in this gang, and efforts were on to arrest them.