Editorial
Petty extortionists creeping
They must be tracked down
With top criminals holed up in their hideouts, some believed to have fled to neghbouring India, petty criminal elements in certain localities are busying themselves with extortionist forays. They take the names of known criminals like Subrata Bain, Khandaker Tanveer Islam Joy and Shahadat Hossain who are absconding and throw their weight around. Over phone, they do such things, demanding money from businessmen, landlords and house owners threatening dire consequences if they failed to pay. Some unsuspected people have already fallen prey to their machinations. In some extortionist forays the thugs even shot persons who refused to pay leaving them injured, or even dead.
Lalmatia, Sobhanbagh, Mohammadpur, Mirpur and Pallabi are areas reported to be vulnerable to extortionist attempts. No less than 10 persons have received threatening phone calls at Sobhanbagh and Lalmatia lately.
The law enforcers are generally seized of the problem as evidenced through some steps they have taken but are yet to be fully effective. They have made some arrests by trapping them and found them to be mostly street urchins or heroin addicts. They may not be associates of the hardened criminals but they are on the brink of being professional criminals themselves. This is the right time to nip them in the bud, otherwise they may turn out to be kidnappers some day.
But what worries us to know is that the law enforcers are running into difficulties in tracking down the callers as the SIM cards used by them were sold without verifying the subscribers' addresses. This gap will perhaps remain till such time as the process of registration of mobile phones is not completed. With the operation over, the unauthorised mobile owners could be separated from the registered lot to be easily identified. But before that happens, are some people to live with the thuggery? The police must track down the culprits by scooping investigations into the cases lodged with them while the recipients of the calls volunteered to furnish all information to them.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments