A large number of cases are pending with several courts as police repeatedly fail to arrest the accused. Law enforcers even cannot trace out several warranted accused living within the jurisdiction of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police.
Police arrest accused in different cases and send them to the court for trial. The court either sends them to jail or give them bail. Once these accused get bail from the court and secure release from the jail, they change their addresses to avoid reappearing before the court for trial.
For the trial the court issues warrant once the accused is not found in the address mentioned in the FIR.
According to police sources, some 8,000 such court cases are currently pending with 50 police stations under the jurisdiction of eight DMP divisions.
A senior police official told the Daily Observer that the police do not preserve copies of the NID (National Identity Card), birth certificate or even thumb impression of the accused in the police docket. So, it becomes difficult for the police to trace them out later.
In the absence of the copy of NID in one such case, one Jahalam spent three years in jail without being the real accused.
It has been made mandatory for passengers to show NID cards or birth certificates even while purchasing tickets for seven inter-city trains, according to the Bangladesh Railway.
So in the absence of this vital information of the accused with the police the accused, more often than not, change their addresses and continue to dodge the police.
Among these cases a number of sensational murder cases have been gathering dust in the Detective Branch (DB) and Criminal Investigation Department (CID) offices, where the cases were transferred for speedy and fair investigation.
A number of rights activists pointed out that there is a multitude of factors responsible for the backlog of cases, such as negligence of investigators, delayed investigation process, lack of skilled investigation officers, and when political influence is exerted.
The activists further added that after every incident, investigation goes on in full swing for days, but it eventually fizzles out with the passage of time.
Meanwhile, a Home Ministry official told this correspondent that Lawful Interception Cell (LIC) has been opened at the police headquarters for digitalization.
The cell is being used for identifying the crime and its perpetrators through mobile tracking, sources added.
The CID has also set up a modern digital forensic lab and IT forensic section and digital evidence is being examined by using the IT forensic software at the lab.
Suspect Identification and Verification System (SIVS) database has been prepared including the biometric information of the alleged criminals which would help police to know the whereabouts of a particular criminal or whether he was involved in fresh crime after coming out on bail from jail, he added.
Md Tanvir Ahmed, a lawyer of the Supreme Court, said on Friday that if crime related information of the alleged perpetrator with NID card and thumb impression are preserved in police stations that will make it easy to traced out any warranted accused.
