Staff Correspondent: Dhaka, Aug-19,

A Dhaka court on Wednesday relieved Bashundhara Group Managing Director (MD) Sayem Sobhan Anvir from the charge of incitement to suicide of college student Mosarat Jahan Munia.

Dhaka Metropolitan Magistrate Rajesh Chowdhury released him after receiving a final report from the police.

Sub-Inspector Alamgir Hossain, General Registration Officer of Gulshan Police Station, confirmed the release order to UNB correspondent.

Although the plaintiff submitted a no-confidence motion against the police report the day before, it failed to sway the court's decision.

Earlier on July 19, the investigating officer of the case, Gulshan Police Station officer-in-charge Abul Hasan, submitted a final report to the court seeking Anvir's release.

Bashundhara MD Sayem Sobhan Anvir was not found culpable in the suicide incitement case of Munia in the final report submitted by the investigating officer, and asked for his name to be dropped.

This has been established without even taking the accused for questioning.

Munia was the married Anvir's lover, who was covering the cost of accommodating her in her posh Gulshan apartment, where he regularly visited her.

Police recovered the hanging body of Munia from the flat in Gulshan on the night of April 26. Munia's elder sister Nusrat Jahan Tania filed a case against Bashundhara Group MD Sayem Sobhan Anvir that night alleging incitement to suicide.

There are apprehensions that that is the point at which the entire case outcome was effectively hatched. Incitement to suicide is almost impossible to prove beyond a shadow of doubt, and also easily bailable.

Police have hardly explored any other possibility - most glaringly, whether she was murdered. The entire conclusion would seem to hinge on having found Munia's body hanging by a scarf from her room's ceiling fan. Photos of the scene were leaked, and showed the dead girl's legs almost slumped and touching her bed.

There was no suicide note or even any suggestion that she wanted to kill herself, in conversations with her sister or anybody else. Rather, she was looking forward to her sister's arrival.

There had been a falling out with Anvir over the previous few days, and she would be heading back to Cumilla.  This was not the first time - it had happened last year as well, when she left an apartment rented by her and Anvir in Banani, going back to Cumilla. No suicide attempt, just in case there was any history there. None.

It was only in March that Anvir had showed up in Cumilla and brought her back. But now things had gone awry again. In fact that is why her sister and cousins were coming to Dhaka anyway that day, April 26, to take her back home.

That morning though, Munia began to call her sister Nusrat early in the morning in a distressed state. The first call Nusrat received was around 9-9.30am. Munia was insisting that she (the sister) come earlier than planned, and that she faced some grave danger. Not that she felt like killing herself. 

The two sisters spoke a few more times. It was mostly Munia enquiring if they had set off yet for Dhaka from Cumilla, trying to hurry them. The last time they spoke was around 11.30am. Nusrat arrived at the house around 3.30pm.

In those 4 hours, Munia for some reason had decided to kill herself, and gone through with it as well.

End/Dct/Abu/Sma/