The butcher with checkered past who dismembered Bangladesh MP’s body

Jihad Joyana Hawladar was already serving a sentence for murder. But within four months, his bail was organised and he was sent to Mumbai.

Five months after the sensational murder of Bangladeshi lawmaker Mohammad Anwarul Azim Anar in Kolkata, the Mumbai Police is piecing together details of the man who executed the kill and then hacked and disposed of the body with such clinical precision that the Kolkata Police is still to gather forensic evidence that the skeletal remains they have in their possession are indeed Anar’s.

The butcher with checkered past who dismembered B’desh lawmaker’s body

On May 13, Anar, a lawmaker from the now deposed Awami League, was in Kolkata on a business trip. He left his friend’s flat at Baranagar in north Kolkata where he was staying, saying he was stepping out for a doctor’s appointment. But as has been established since he went to meet a woman at New Town flat for an assignation instead. In that New Town duplex flat, Anar’s assassin also lay in wait. Anar was first smothered to death with pillow, then his flesh was minced, bones minutely chopped, and the remains packed into polythene bags to be scattered all across Kolkata.

It’s the case of the Bangladesh and Kolkata police that Anar’s business partner, Akhtarussaman, a US citizen of Bangladeshi origin, contracted the kill for ₹5 crore after an alleged dispute arose between the two men over a missing consignment of 60kg of gold. But it’s only now that some details of the long and meticulous planning of the gory murder are emerging, and the police in Mumbai are cracking down on a wider network of Bangladeshi operatives who facilitated the kill.

While Akhtarussaman, who allegedly commissioned the kill, is thought to have escaped to the US via Kathmandu immediately after the murder, the woman who was used to lure Anar to the New Town flat also escaped to Bangladesh, where she has been since arrested. The Kolkata CID team arrested two persons: Siam Hossain, 33, who was used to dispose the body parts across Kolkata; and Jihad Joyana Hawladar, 25, who killed Anar and then chopped up his body.

Hawladar, a butcher by profession, was already serving a sentence for murder. In March 2023, he killed a man in Khulna, Bangladesh, after some dispute. But within four months, his bail was organised and he was sent to Mumbai in August 2023 to await further instructions from Akhtarussaman.

For the next seven months, Hawladar lay low, working as a labourer who made scaffolds at multiple sites in Navi Mumbai. After Hawladar’s arrest by Kolkata CID, the Mumbai Police started looking into his antecedents and found that he had been smuggled into India by a Mumbai travel agent who was the conduit between Hawladar and those who contracted Anar’s execution.

While the Mumbai-based agent is untraceable, on October 2, police arrested Bangladeshi national, Shaikh Mohammed Idris aka Jashimuddin Bishu Dewan, who was allegedly living illegally in Mumbai since 1994. During interrogation, sleuths at the LT Marg police station found 105 numbers with the Bangladesh code (+880) saved on his mobile phone, and call detail record from the three sim cards recovered from him revealed details of multiple video calls between Idris and certain persons of interest in Bangladesh.

Idris initially told police that he was an Indian national, and he lived at Navroji Hill Road at Dongri. However, during sustained questioning, he revealed that his true name was Jashimuddin Bishu Dewan and that he had come into India in 1994 from his village Sharatola in Bangladesh’s Jashore district. He lived in Dharavi and the absconding travel agent had helped him procure an Aadhar card, a ration card, a PAN card, a driving license and a voter ID card using forged documents.

Investigation has revealedthat Hawladar had dropped out from the local government school located in his village and he was a stoutly built soft-spoken man who kept a low profile. Police are investigating how Jihad reached Navi Mumbai and who got him a job with a scaffolding contractor in Kharghar area .

Hawladar’s colleagues in the scaffolding unit told police that he was punctual, did not take a single day off from work, and though he spoke Bangla, his inflection was different from other Bengali workers. He never got into any arguments, did not drink like the others in the team, but would smoke bidis and kept the multiple injury marks on his chest well covered. In March 2024, Hawladar suddenly stopped coming to work and his Indian sim card, procured from Navi Mumbai, went dead.

As is now known, he had been summoned by his handlers to Kolkata , where he was introduced to the woman and Siam Hossain, and where they lay in wait for the next two months for Anar, the lawmaker, to arrive.