Bangladesh court frames charges against five accused

A court in Bangladesh's capital Dhaka Wednesday framed charges against five accused in the Saudi diplomat Khalaf Al Ali murder case. Special Public Prosecutor Mohammad Rafiqul Islam told reporters that the court fixed Thursday for starting the trail of the case. Four accused who are now in police custody claimed themselves innocent and demanded justice after the charges were read out to them. The court framed charges against the fifth accused in absentia and issued an arrest warrant against him. Talking to media, defence lawyer Mohammad Saiful Islam Khandakar Palash claimed innocence of the accused, saying, "They ( the accused) were forced to give confessional statements." But the Special Public Prosecutor said there was ample evidence to frame charges against the accused in the murder case of the diplomat. Khalaf, 45, a second secretary at the Royal Embassy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Dhaka, was shot dead near his Gulshan house in Dhaka's diplomatic enclave in the wee hours of March 6 this year. Belying speculations about third- party role, Bangladesh Police in July announced that Saudi diplomat's murder was related to street crime. "Detectives have arrested the four robbery suspects who confessed to the killing of the Saudi diplomat Khalaf Al Ali," Mollah Nazrul Islam, a deputy commissioner of Detective Brach of Bangladesh Police, then told reporters in a press briefing. He informed the media that "the robbers said they had no intention to kill Ali. They wanted to snatch away valuable from Ali, but the diplomat was struck by a bullet as he started to scuffle with them." "During the scuffle, the pistol went off and the bullet hit him, " he also quoted the arrestees as saying during the interrogation. This is the first time a foreign diplomat was murdered in Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority nation, which enjoys good relations with Saudi Arabia where over 2 million workers from the South Asian nation are living and working to send home remittances.