Bangla funds trail leads to Tamil Nadu

KOLKATA: When the National Investigation Agency is probing the Indo-Bangla terror racket and the related fund flow across borders, the North 24 Parganas Police has stumbled upon a similar fund channel with its roots in Basirhat and Bongaon in Bengal, Perundurai in Tamil Nadu and Bangladesh.
The North 24 Parganas Police have identified at least seven bank accounts where funds as much as Rs 1 crore were transferred in each of these accounts from Tamil Nadu every month before the money went to Bangladesh.Digging deep, police aided by the Tamil Nadu district have come across 50,000 suspected Bangladeshis working as construction workers and labour contractors in the Erode district of Tamil Nadu.
Police got to know about this Tamil Nadu link during interrogation of Amir Ali, hailing from Mandir Hat at Hasnabad in North 24 Parganas, arrested three days ago on December 23. Acting on the tip off , police rounded up five members of the Tamil Nadu gang, said SP Tanmoy Roy Chowdhury. Ali happens to be their linkman in Bengal.
But the huge illegal fund transfer racket didn’t come to light so easily. The lead came after the police pursued the probe for more than a week following the arrest of a suspected Bangladeshi Masud Billa alias Rahul Das. Billa was rounded up on December 12 from Soladanga, two kilometres from the Ghojadanga Police Station in North 24 Parganas along the Indo-Bangla border.
Billa told investigators that he faked his name as Rahul Das after he went to ground in the Soladanga area. The suspected Bangladeshi also told the police that he took up a labour contractor job in Assam and later shifted to Tamil Nadu. “Billa got acquainted with some other Bangladeshi people working at construction sites in the Erode district. While he became closer to them, the Bangladeshi suspects asked him to relocate at Basirhat and give monetary help to the suspected Bangldeshis arrested from the area as terrorists. They asked him to get in touch with their man in Basirhat Amir Ali who will give him Rs 50,000,” the North 24 Parganas SP said.
Accordingly, Billa came to Basirhat in search of Amir Ali. He found him at Mandirhat and asked for the money. Soon after getting the money, Billa did nothing for moving bail for the arrested. Instead he went to ground with the entire money and took the new name — Rahul Das to fake his identity. Members of the Tamil Nadu gang soon came to know about it and came down to Basirhat in search of Billa.
Police rounded up Amir Ali based on what Billa said about him, though Ali got bail within days. The North 24 Parganas Police didn’t give up. They continued with the investigation and identified seven bank accounts of Amir Ali. Investigators found to their surprise that each of these accounts had a monthly transaction of one crore rupees a month. They took Ali in custody and got to know about the Tamil Nadu link. According to the North 24 Parganas Police, this cross-border gang mints money by spreading fake currency, a part of which is being spent to fund the legal defence of the arrested Bangladeshis, while the rest is siphoned off to Bangladesh through different channels. “Amir Ali and Masud Billa are the suspected link men to this huge racket,” the North 24 Parganas SP said.