Sajeeb Wazed Joy, the son of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, has given his testimony in court against five people in a case over a plot to abduct and murder him.
Joy, also the prime minister's ICT adviser, attended the hearing conducted by Dhaka Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Asaduzzman Noor on Sunday, according to public prosecutor Abdullah Abu.
So far, 10 of the 15 witnesses in the case have testified before the court. The case was filed with Paltan Police Station in August 2015, according to bdnews24.com.
Mohammad Ullah Mamun, vice-president of Jatiyatabadi Samajik Sangskritik Sangstha, a pro-BNP organisation, and other top-brass leaders of the BNP and its allies united at the group's office in Dhaka’s Paltan, New York, and the UK at some point before September 2011 to chalk out a plan to murder Joy after abducting him, according to the case dossier.
The other accused are Shafik Rehman, former editor of the Jai Jai Din, Mahmudur Rahman, acting editor of Bangla-language newspaper Amar Desh, Mamun's son Rizve Ahmed Caesar, and Mizanur Rahman Bhuiyan, a businessman living in the United States.
Rizve collected personal information on Joy from the US intelligence agency FBI and provided it to the other suspects, according to the chargesheet.
Similar accounts are mentioned in another court document, dealing with a case in which Rizve was handed a three-year jail term in 2015 after being found guilty of bribing an FBI official to obtain classified information.
The document indicated that he handed the information to a Bangladeshi journalist in return for $30,000.
The matter also triggered discussions in the Bangladesh parliament. Joy, who lives in the US with his family, accused BNP leaders of conspiring to ‘abduct and kill him’ in a Facebook post in March that year.
Police later pressed charges against the five suspects in February 2018.
