A total of 33 Awami League-nominated candidates have been elected unopposed in the fourth phase of polls in 725 union parishads (UPs) scheduled for May 7. Like the first three phases of the local body elections, there are no BNP chairman candidates in 106 Ups. In all, 3,245 chairman candidates of 16 out of 40 registered political parties and independent aspirants will contest the election, Election Commission sources said yesterday. They said the 16 political parties have fielded 1,723 chairman candidates. The Awami League has nominated the highest number, 724, followed by the BNP with 619. Jatiya Party has nominated 156, Islami Andolan Bangladesh 154 and the Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal 42.
In all, 1,522 independent Tonmoy, Kapil and Saddam have been taken on police remand, police said.
“We arrested the Grameenphone employees following a CID inquiry into a case filled with the Motijheel police station by Rafiqul Islam, a businessman,” Shah Alam said. CID inspector Ashrafuzzaman, investigating officer of the case, said the five Grameenphone employees worked in different customer care centres of the mobile operator.
The Grameenphone management, however, told The Independent that they were not aware of the arrests.
Rafiqul Islam, the owner of a mobile banking outlet, Rawa Enterprise, at Fakirapool, had complained that on January 31, an unidentified person(s) had withdrawn Tk. 24,500 and Tk. 5,000 in two separate fake transactions using his mobile number.
That night, when a person came to the shop and asked for an amount of Tk. 1,000 in cash, Rafiqul Islam said the number had been deactivated.
Rafiqul Islam immediately informed Dutch-Bangla Bank Ltd and bKash about these fraudulent transactions and later came to know that someone had cloned his SIM card and was using it to withdraw cash from his account.
CID official Shah Alam told The Independent that the 11 fraudsters were arrested following Rafiqul’s complaint.
He said the five employees of Grameenphone working in its customer care cells were arrested after a meticulous investigation proved their involvement in passing on mobile banking details to the fraudsters. “This gang used the Grameenphone employees to clone the SIMs of agents and customers to siphon off money from customer accounts,” he added.
“We took time to zero in on the gang and used different tactics to acquire the passwords used by them,” Shah Alam said. Alam added that modern technology was used to track down the gang.