After being missing for more than a year, former diplomat Maroof Zaman has returned home, says his family.
The former ambassador to Qatar and Vietnam returned to home on Saturday (Mar 16), his daughter Shabnam Zaman confirmed in a social media post and said there were no further details to share for now.
“After 15 and a half months, or 467 days... my father is back,” the PhD student at Brussels University wrote in a Facebook post. Police said the family did not report to them, but they were looking into it.
Maroof went missing on the evening of Dec 4, 2017 after he left home for the airport to pick up his other daughter Samiha who was returning from Belgium after visiting her sister.
An hour after Maroof had left the house, he reportedly phoned the maid to hand over the laptop when someone would knock the door, the former diplomat’s sister Shahrina had told the media then.
Shahrina and Maroof live in the same apartment complex at Road 9A in Dhanmondi.
Quoting the house help, she said the three stockily built men took away a laptop, a computer CPU, a camera and a smartphone.
Police had collected the footage from the building’s security camera which showed three masked men entering the building and leave after a while.
The family filed a missing person’s report with police the next day. His car was found on the road from Kuril Biswa Road to Purbachal in Dhaka by police later the same day.
Maroof had been living with his daughter, and two house helps on the third floor of a six-storey Dhanmondi building that he inherited from the family. His wife passed away in 2012.
His elder sister Shahrina and younger brother Rifat live in the same building.
Neither the family nor the police could then provide any clue about the reason for his disappearance.
Rifat said his brother was upset about family losses. Their mother died in April 2012, and his wife passed away in December the same year. They lost their father the next year.
“But, this has nothing to do with his disappearance. He was not involved in any political activities either,” he said then.
Police said they were yet to be informed over the matter.
“The family has not informed us, but still we are looking into it,” Dhaka Metropolitan Police Deputy Commissioner Maruf Hossain Sardar told Bangla Tribune.