A court in Cox’s Bazar on Saturday placed the hotel manager arrested in connection with the gang rape of a tourist in Cox’s Bazar on remand for four days.
Cox’s Bazar senior judicial magistrate Hamimun Tanjin passed the order after tourist police produced the accused Riaz Uddin in court and appealed for seven-day remand for interrogation, reports UNB.
Riaz Uddin, manager of Zia Guest Inn Hotel, one of two locations where the woman was raped, will be interrogated for his involvement, while efforts are on to arrest the others, including principal accused Ashiqul Islam Ashiq, and his partners in crime Abdul Jobbar Joy, Babu and Riaz Uddin Chhoton, said Zillur Rahman, Superintendent of Cox’s Bazar tourist police, talking to UNB Saturday evening.
Earlier on Friday, the court recorded the victim’s statement, said inspector Ruhul Amin, investigation officer in the case.
On Thursday, the woman’s husband filed the case under the Prevention of Women & Children Repression Act at Cox's Bazar Sadar Model Police Station accusing seven people.
The 22-year-old woman came to Cox's Bazar with her husband and their eight-month-old baby on Wednesday morning and checked into a hotel.
In the afternoon, the family went out for a stroll on the sea beach. At Laboni point, the woman's husband had an altercation with one of the accused - thought to be Ashiq, who has an extensive criminal record and only got out of his last stint in jail 2 weeks ago -after they accidentally bumped into each other.
What started as a small argument soon snowballed into a major altercation and the young man called his accomplices to the spot. Later in the day they kidnapped the family in two auto-rickshaws and took them to a desolate place near the golf club where three of them allegedly violated the woman.
Her ordeal did not end there. The family was taken to Zia Guest Inn, of which arrested manager Riaz Uddin was a friend of Ashiq's, and there the three accused again took turns to rape her for hours. They released her in the early hours of Thursday and allegedly threatened to kill her family if she narrated her ordeal to anyone.
Lieutenant Colonel Khairul Islam Sarkar, commanding officer of Rab-15, said their team rushed to the family's rescue soon after they got the call from the woman. Earlier calls to 999 proved futile.