3 madrasa students found dead

An imam found the bodies of his six-year-old son and two other boys in his room at a mosque in Chandpur’s Matlab yesterday.

Abdullah Al Noman, 6, Ibrahim, 8, and Rifat Hossain, 10, were madrasa students.

Police termed the deaths mysterious, saying the room at Purba Kaladi Jame Mosjid, where the bodies were found, was locked from inside and there were no injury marks on their bodies or evidence of any of them taking poison or sedatives.

Jamal Uddin, imam of Purba Kaladi Jame Mosjid, told police that his son Noman was in his room when he left it for Juma prayers. He saw Ibrahim and Rifat entering the room around 12:00pm, said Zihadul Kabir, superintendent of police in Chandpur.

After the prayers, Jamal tried to enter his room around 2:30pm and found the door locked from inside.

With the help of a local man, he broke into the room and found the boys lying on the floor, the SP said.

Seeing their lifeless bodies, they called police.

Doctors pronounced them dead after police reached there and sent the bodies to a hospital. 

Rifat and Ibrahim were students of nearby Matlab Dakshin Bhangapar Madrasa. Rifat also worked as the muezzin of the mosque, said Ahsan Habib, assistant superintendent of police (Matlab Circle).

“It is a very mysterious case,” he said, adding that police did not find any sign of suffocation or smell suggesting the cause of their deaths.

Police are interrogating the imam, said Swapan Kumar Aich, officer-in-charge of Matlab Dakshin Police Station.

“We are investigating the cause of their death,” he told The Daily Star.

The bodies were sent for autopsies.