Staff Reporter :
A Dhaka court has sentenced three men to life imprisonment and acquitted four others in the 2015 murder case of Italian citizen Cesare Tavella.
The verdict was delivered by Sheikh Samidul Islam, judge of Dhaka’s Third Additional Metropolitan Sessions Judge’s Court, on Thursday (3 July).
Those sentenced to life in prison are Tamjid Ahmed alias Rubel, Russell Chowdhury, and Minhazul Arefin alias Baghne Russell.
The four acquitted are BNP leader MA Quayum, his brother Abdul Matin, Shakhawat Hossain, and Sohel.
Among the accused, Tamjid, Russell, Minhazul, Matin, and Shakhawat had earlier confessed to their involvement in the killing during various stages of the trial.
Two of the accused, MA Quayum and Sohel, were tried in absentia as they had remained absconding throughout the proceedings.
Matin was on bail, while the remaining four were in custody and were present in court when the verdict was announced.
According to the case documents, Tavella, a staff member of the Netherlands-based international development organization ICCO Cooperation, was gunned down by unidentified assailants on the evening of 28 September 2015.
The incident occurred on the footpath adjacent to the southern wall of the Governor House, near Road 90 in Dhaka’s Gulshan area.
Locals rushed Tavella to United Hospital, where doctors declared him dead upon arrival. Shortly after the incident, a statement claiming responsibility was allegedly released by the terrorist group Islamic State (IS), according to a US-based website.
Following the murder, Helen Dabuik, ICCO’s resident representative in Bangladesh, filed a case with Gulshan Police Station, naming three unidentified individuals as suspects.
On 28 June 2016, Detective Branch (DB) Inspector Golam Rabbani, who investigated the case, submitted a charge sheet to the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate’s Court in Dhaka, accusing seven individuals, including BNP Joint Convener and former Ward Commissioner MA Quayum.
The charge sheet, later accepted by the then Metropolitan Sessions Judge Kamrul Hossain Molla on 24 August 2016, stated that the motive behind the killing was to create fear by murdering a white foreigner and thereby tarnishing Bangladesh’s international image.
The long-awaited verdict marks a significant chapter in a case that drew widespread international attention and diplomatic concern at the time of the incident.
