[BenarNews] A prime suspect arrested overnight in connection with deadly anti-Hindu riots last week has confessed to planting a Koran at a Hindu festival site, an act that helped provoke Bangladesh’s worst religious violence in decades, officials said Friday.Police arrested Ikbal Hossain, 35, on Thursday night from Cox’s Bazar, about 290 kilometers (180 miles) from Cumilla, the district where the violence began on Oct. 13 after an online video post showed the Koran at the Hindu site.
"[I]n primary interrogation [Ikbal] admitted that he placed the Koran at the Puja site," two senior coppers told BenarNews on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case. Puja refers to an annual nine-day Hindu festival, Durga Puja.
But S.M. Tanvir Ahmed, Cumilla Police’s additional superintendent, all but acknowledged that Ikbal said he had placed the Koran at the puja venue.
"We are trying to find out why he placed the Koran at the Puja venue. We need to know who hired him to do this, if anyone did," Tanvir told BenarNews without giving additional details.
He said the suspect was brought to Cumilla from Cox’s Bazar around noon on Friday, after which police began to interrogate him.
Last week’s alleged desecration of the Koran — said to have been placed at the feet of a statue at a puja site — enraged Moslems in Cumilla, who attacked Hindus, their homes, temples and puja venues.
The violence spread to districts near Cumilla on the same day, and around the Moslem-majority country over the next few days.
Police said they identified Iqbal, a resident of Cumilla, from a 17-minute long edited video of CCTV footage from around the puja site where the Koran had been placed.
In the footage, a man was seen picking up a Koran from a mosque near the Darogabari area of Cumilla city, police said. He was then seen entering the puja site with the Koran and leaving without it, police added.
After seeing the video footage Ikbal’s mother, Amina Begum, confirmed that the man seen with the Koran was her son, Cumilla Police’s Tanvir said.
According to his family members, Ikbal was addicted to drugs, Tanvir said.
However,
there is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened...
Nirmal Paul, a puja organizer in Cumilla, was not inclined to believe that.
"Some people are saying that Ikbal is mentally sick. But I think committing such a horrible act and running away is something a mentally ill person cannot possibly do," she told Benar News on Thursday.