Dhaka, (Samajweekly) A human trafficking network spearheaded by Dhaka’s Tiktok Hridoy, 26, is active across Middle East, India and Bangladesh.
The gang has contact with some hotel chains in India, where girls are trafficked, Md Shahidullah, Deputy Commissioner of Police, Tejgaon Division, disclosed this at a media briefing here on Saturday.
Shahidullah told IANS: “Hridoy has a gang comprising some people from the southeastern districts of Bangladesh and some others from Indian states.”
Recently, Hridoy was in the news after a video of his alleged involvement in the gang-rape and brutal torture of a Bangladeshi girl in India’s Bengaluru went viral on social media.
Assam police had shared clips from the video that was circulating on social media to trace the accused, following which the Bengaluru city police arrested four men and two women in connection with the case.
The Bangladesh police later identified Hridoy from Dhaka’s Maghbazar as one of the perpetrators of the crime.
The rape victim’s father later filed a case with the Hatirjheel police station under the Human Trafficking and Pornography Act on Thursday night.
The victim’s mother said they were unaware that their daughter had been trafficked to another country.
She appealed to the police, “Bring back my daughter right away. I can’t imagine her being so far away, in another country.”
The victim, who had studied up to grade three, had married a man from Chandpur seven years ago. The couple with their three-year-old daughter used to live in Moghbazar. Her husband is a migrant worker who went to Kuwait three years back, and the woman used to regularly visit her parents.
“A little over a year ago, she met her husband’s friend Hridoy in Moghbazar and told me that he would help her find work abroad with her husband. I tried to stop her, but she went anyway,” the victim’s father said.
He alleged that his daughter might have been coerced into going to India. He could not keep in touch with her as he fell ill following the outbreak of Covid-19.
All five Bangladeshis arrested in connection with the incident in India went there illegally, and none of them had passports or visas.
They used to traffic school and college girls by conning them with TikTok related promises, Shahidullah said, adding: “India will investigate the case in its own way and we will probe the matter in our own way. However, since the perpetrators are Bangladeshis, efforts are being made to bring them back to the country through coordination between the two countries. Efforts to bring the survivor back are also being made.”
