TOUSIF KAIUM

What began as a mother’s demand for justice -- claiming her son was shot during the July uprising -- was in fact a scripted plot driven by vendetta.

An investigation by the Police Bureau of Investigation (PBI) found that Shihab Uddin, then a Class-X student whose mother filed an attempted murder case against local political leaders in Sylhet’s Companiganj, was not shot at all. Instead, he was injured in a road accident elsewhere, hours after the alleged attack.

In a separate case, a living person was shown dead. While it was alleged that the 20-year-old man was killed in the capital’s Uttara area during the uprising, the PBI found that the man was alive.

These were not the only such cases. The PBI has identified at least 14 fake cases while investigating 195 Complaint Register (CR) cases filed with courts nationwide over incidents linked to the July mass uprising.

According to PBI headquarters data, the motives behind the filing of false cases ranged from previous enmity to family disputes. Of those, 10 were filed on attempted murder charges, three over attacks and physical assault, and one on murder charges.

Moreover, the agency could not find any evidence to substantiate the allegations in 10 more cases.

“We thoroughly verified the allegations multiple times but found no evidence to support them. Final reports have been submitted in those cases, and petitions have been filed with courts, seeking the discharge of the accused,” PBI Superintendent of Police (Legal and Media) Md Abu Yosuf told The Daily Star last week.

The agency has so far completed investigations into 113 out of 195 CR cases.

It found evidence in 89 cases -- nine of which involve murder charges and the rest involve offences such as attempted murder. In these cases, 6,844 individuals were named as accused, but evidence was found against 1,343 of them, the data show.

When contacted, Khondaker Rafiqul Islam,

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