Authorities at the High Court have suspended an employee allegedly for providing fake documents to an accused’s lawyers to help him get bail; he also allegedly took Tk 15,000 in bribe to do so.
Md Moshiur Rahman, office assistant and translator at the court's criminal miscellaneous section, was suspended on Tuesday (Jul 9), according to a notice published on the Supreme Court website on Thursday (Jul 11).
The notice says Moshiur collected some case dockets from his stenographer colleague Mehedi Hasan. Afterwards, he supplied the papers to lawyer Abdul Mukit, who represented accused Sohel Mollah, to help the latter secure bail.
Earlier on May 23, a High Court bench had rejected the petition as "not pressed." Mukit managed to get the case filed against Sohel on the cause list of the High Court.
Without registering the petition as rejected on the court log, as per court regulations, he collected the paperwork through illegal means, and filed tampered paperwork to put the petition on the cause list of two different High Court benches—Annex 16 and Annex 17 —which is also illegal.
Sohel received the bail at Annex 16 on Jun 30. The court was not briefed with the earlier proceedings of the case.
For the entire process, Moshiur took Tk 15,000 in bribe from Sohel’s uncle. The court administration noticed the irregular activity and suspended Moshiur upon finding him guilty of committing the punishable offence.
On May 29 this year, an administrative officer named Md Golam Faruq of the High Court was sacked on allegations of corruption brought by the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC).
On Jul 1, Md Zakir Hossain, assistant bench officer at the High Court Division, was slapped with a two-year ban on his increment as a departmental action over a disciplinary violation.