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Five days after the rape and murder of eight-year-old Ramisa Akter in Dhaka's Pallabi, the police have filed a chargesheet against her neighbours Sohel Rana and his wife Swapna Akter.
The investigating officer of the case, Sub Inspector (SI) Wahiduzzaman of Pallabi Police Station, submitted the chargesheet to the prosecution division of a Dhaka court on Sunday afternoon.
He said that Sohel has been charged with rape and murder and Swapna has been charged with aiding and abetting the murder in the report.
The chargesheet will be presented in the court of Dhaka Metropolitan Magistrate Ashraful Haque, said SI Abul Kalam Azad of the Prosecution Division.
Police recovered the body of Ramisa from a flat in the B Block of Section 11 in Pallabi on May 19.
Law enforcers said that 32-year-old Sohel, a resident of the flat next door, slit the child's throat and severed her head from her body that morning. Sohel, who was subletting the flat, then escaped by cutting the window bars of the flat. However, his wife Swapna stayed at home.
Police then arrested Swapna from the house. That evening, Sohel was arrested from Narayanganj’s Fatullah.
Ramisa's father, Abdul Hannan Mollah, filed a case with Pallabi Police Station on the same day, accusing two people over the brutal incident.
The complaint states that Ramisa lived with her family in a flat in Section 11 of Pallabi. She was a student in second grade of Popular Model High School. Sohel and Swapna were subletting another flat in the building. When Ramisa left her house around 9:30am on Tuesday, the accused allegedly took her to their room on the third floor of the building.
Around 10:30am, while looking for Ramisa to take her to school, her mother saw the girl's sandals in front of the accused's room. Then, after calling out and not receiving any response, Ramisa's mother broke down the door with the help of the other flat tenants and entered. They found Ramisa's headless body and her head in a bucket in the bathroom of Sohel and Swapna’s room. Swapna was standing there.
During interrogation, Swapna said that Sohel locked Ramisa in the bathroom, then raped and killed her. To hide the body, he cut off the head with a knife and separated both arms from the shoulders. He then brought the body from the bathroom and placed it under the bed in the bedroom. The head was then left in the bucket of the bathroom. She claimed Sohel then escaped by cutting the window bars.
No member of the Dhaka Bar Association has agreed to provide legal services for the accused so far.
On Saturday, the government appointed Azizur Rahman Dulu as a special public prosecutor (PP) to handle the case for the state.