Businessmen now sitting ducks to a killing spree

In fact he wasn't the only one to have met with such a tragic end recently. Bengali daily Prothom Alo reported that extortionists and criminals had murdered at least eight businessmen in the last twenty days in Dhaka. They don't just kill; if they failed to get money, they even slit the wrists of businessmen, physically assault them and ransack their offices creating an environment of terror and panic. To add insult to the injury, cops and a group of people calling themselves as 'sources of police' have also been allegedly involved in this extortionist racket. This is a serious allegation that one hopes the higher police authorities are seized of. For, if that is not the height of lawlessness, then would someone tell us what is? In such intolerable and violent circumstances, the business community has been pushed to the wall.

Despite the entreaties of businessmen for stepped up security at the important trading hubs of the city, the police have not been, in their words, co-operative enough in neutralising the criminal gangs. But police can't be blamed on a wholesale basis either. The extortionists are said to be 'politically protected'. Without that 'oxygen of support' they didn't stand a chance of surviving. For all practical purposes, the responsibility of bringing these criminals to justice lies with the ruling party. As the saying goes -- there is nothing that the police can't do, if they wish to. Overall, however, one has to say that without the right kind of political will, the battle against crime cannot simply be won.

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