PM assures Ilias’s wife of ‘all-out’ steps to rescue him

Staff Correspondent

The family of BNP leader M Ilias Ali, who went missing from Dhaka on April 17, meet the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, at Gana Bhaban in Dhaka on Wednesday. — New Age photo

The prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, on Wednesday assured the wife of the BNP’s organising secretary M Ilias Ali, who went missing on April 17, of all-out efforts to rescue Ilias.
‘I have urged her to rescue my husband and she listened to me cordially and assured me of all-out efforts in this regard,’ Ilias’s wife Tahsina Rushdir Luna told newsmen after a meeting with the prime minister at Gana Bhaban.
‘The prime minister’s assurance has made me hopeful. Please you all pray for me,’ Tahsina added.
She declined to make any
further comments on the meeting behind the closed doors that continued for about half an hour.
Mahbubul Haque Shakil, the prime minister’s special assistant (press), said that the prime minister had asked the law enforcement agencies to put in highest efforts to find out the BNP leader as soon as possible.
‘Humanity is more important than politics. From the humanitarian point of view, it is the responsibility of the government to rescue a missing people,’ Hasina is quoted by Shakil to have said at the meeting.
Earlier about 5:30pm, Tahsina reached Gana Bhaban along with her three children to meet the prime minister.
Ilias Ali’s wife at a press conference at her house on Monday morning sought an appointment with the prime minister and urged her to rescue her husband at ‘any cost.’
Tahsina said that she wanted to get back her husband alive, even on ‘any condition.’
The Sylhet division’s organising secretary of the party, Ilias, also a former lawmaker, and his driver went missing about midnight past April 17.
On April 18, the police found Ilias’s car left
abandoned near his house and the BNP on the day called a dawn-to-dusk general strike for April 22.
Tthe party also extended the strike to April 23 and 24.
The party also enforced two-day nationwide
general strike on April 29 and 30 to press home its demand for the ‘return’ of Ilias Ali.