In a chilling breakthrough, Dhaka Metropolitan Police have unraveled the mystery behind the brutal murder of seven-year-old Rifat, whose body was found hidden inside a rice drum at a garbage dump in Gendaria. The suspect, Maya Akhter—a former neighbor of the victim’s family in the Kadamtali area—was arrested after investigators painstakingly tracked her down using a unique piece of clothing found on the victim and matching closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage. During intense police interrogation, the suspect confessed to luring the young boy into her apartment with the promise of food before staging the horrific crime. According to Kadamtali Police Station Officer-in-Charge Sheikh Ashrafuzzaman, the motive stemmed from a five-month-old grudge; Maya suspected Rifat’s family of stealing her mobile phone when they lived next door to each other.
The tragic chain of events began on February 17, when Rifat went missing while playing near the Khanqa Sharif Pukurbad area in Kadamtali. When he failed to return by nightfall, his frantic family filed a missing person’s report with the local police. According to the police timeline, Maya spotted the child playing alone, coaxed him into her flat using bread and bananas as bait, and then aggressively pressured him to confess to the alleged phone theft. When the child refused, Maya repeatedly slammed his head against a bed frame, killing him on the spot. To conceal the crime, she packed Rifat’s body inside a large metal drum, covered it with a layer of rice, and kept watch over it through the night. The following morning, CCTV cameras captured Maya loading the heavy drum onto a battery-operated auto-rickshaw, which she transported nearly six kilometers away to dump at a landfill near Gendaria’s Loharpul. The police have formally charged the suspect, and further legal proceedings are currently underway.
