The police have arrested four individuals, including two dental students, in connection with collecting human skeletons from graves across the country and selling them through an online network.
The police recovered 47 human skulls and a large quantity of human bones during raids conducted Monday night at Monipuri Para and Uttara.
Dhaka Metropolitan Police deputy commissioner for Tejgaon Mohammad Ibne Mizan disclosed the information at a press briefing at the DMP Media Centre on Tuesday.
The arrested dental students are Md Faisal Ahmed, 26, and Kazi Jahurul Islam Soumik, 25. The other two arrested are Abul Kalam, 39, and Asadul Munsi, 32.
The police said that Faisal recently sat for his final examinations at Sapporo Dental College Hospital and was awaiting his internship, while Soumik is a final-year student at the same institution.
Mizan said that the Tejgaon police received information that human skeletons were being sold at Monipuri Para.
‘Acting on the tip-off, our team went to the area and questioned a suspicious individual, from whom we recovered a human skeleton during interrogation,’ he said.
Based on information obtained from Soumik, Abul Kalam and Asadul Munsi were arrested with two more skeletons, Mizan said.
Investigators further learned that the group was part of an organised network operating across the country and they also said more skeletons were stored in a room at the hostel of Sapporo Dental College at Uttara in the capital.
‘The police later conducted another drive at the hostel at Uttara Sector 9 and arrested Faisal. From the room, we recovered 44 human skulls and various human bones kept in bags and sacks,’ the police official said.
He added that the group ran an online platform called ‘Bones Selling’, through which skeletons, bought from field-level collectors for Tk 6,000–8,000, and later sold for Tk 15,000–20,000, were mainly sold to medical and dental students.
The group had about 20,000 members, while nearly 700 people were involved in different stages of the operation.
‘Members of the network collected skeletons from graves in Gazipur, Mymensingh, Sherpur and Jamalpur. They usually waited for about a year after burial before digging up bodies from unprotected graves lacking security, lighting or CCTV cameras,’ Mizan said.
If any family suspected that the remains of their relatives were taken from graves, DNA testing to help verify the identities would be arranged, he said, adding that efforts were on to arrest other members of the network.
