RAB arrests prime accused over Razbari woman’s electrocution death

Faridpur Man Arrested After Electrocuting a Sharecropper and Attempting to Hide Her Body

Thebangladaily.com – A 55-year-old woman who worked the land under a sharecropping arrangement was killed when she touched a live electrical wire strung illegally around a sugarcane plot in Goalanda upazila, Rajbari district. Eight hours after receiving a formal requisition from local police, Rapid Action Battalion-10 (RAB-10) pulled the prime suspect from his home in Faridpur district early Saturday morning, September 5, and charged him with both the killing and the subsequent attempt to bury evidence.

The victim, Nabiran Nesa, had been out working her leased farmland since roughly 4:00 PM on Tuesday, September 2. When evening came and she had not walked home, her daughter began searching the surrounding fields. By approximately 9:00 PM, the daughter located her mother’s body submerged in standing water on an adjacent plot owned by the accused, Rafiqul Islam, son of the late Jalil Mridha of Ainuddin Pramanik Para in Daulatdia. Neighbors helped carry the woman to Goalanda Upazila Health Complex, where the on-duty doctor pronounced her dead on arrival.

From Misdiagnosis to Discovery of a Live Wire

In the earliest hours of inquiry, investigators accepted a surface-level explanation: the elderly farmer had slipped into the irrigation water and succumbed to a cardiac episode. That reading collapsed when family members combed the perimeter of the incident site and uncovered a galvanized-iron (GI) wire running in a makeshift circuit around the accused’s sugarcane field. The wiring had been installed without any sanctioned connection to the utility grid, leaving bare conductors exposed at ground level. Nabiran Nesa, moving through the adjacent paddy plot, apparently made contact with the energized wire and was electrocuted on the spot.

What followed turned a workplace fatality into a suspected concealment case. According to RAB investigators, the accused dragged the body out of the flooded paddy field and deposited it within the sugarcane crop. A shallow pit had also been excavated beside the sugarcane plot, apparently prepared so the corpse could be interred before anyone questioned the circumstances of her disappearance.

The Arrest and the Chain of Custody

Major Farhan Mahmud Moktada, Company Commander of RAB-10’s Faridpur detachment, confirmed the operation in a written statement issued Saturday afternoon. He stated that a standard case had first been registered at Goalanda Ghat Police Station. The investigating officer there then transmitted a requisition to RAB-10 headquarters in Dhaka, asking the battalion to identify and detain those responsible. RAB-10 escalated its intelligence surveillance in the Goalanda area and, within eight hours of receiving the formal request, located and seized Rafiqul Islam at approximately 2:00 AM from the Bepari Para locality under Kotwali Police Station jurisdiction in Faridpur district.

“RAB-10 remains firmly committed to maintaining law and order and bringing criminals to justice,” the battalion stated in its release.

Sharecropping, Rural Wiring, and the Cost of Informal Electricity

Nabiran Nesa’s death sits at the intersection of two persistent vulnerabilities in Bangladesh’s agrarian economy. Sharecropping — in which a landless or near-landless farmer works a plot owned by another household and splits the harvest — remains widespread in the northern districts, including Rajbari. Workers in such arrangements typically have no contractual protection, no employer liability, and limited recourse when an accident occurs on someone else’s land. A woman described by RAB officials as physically weakened by poverty nonetheless rose each afternoon to tend rented fields, a pattern common across the Goalanda and surrounding upazilas where smallholdings cannot sustain a family without supplemental labor.

The second vulnerability is the informal electrical infrastructure that proliferates in rural Bangladesh. Because formal metered connections can be slow to reach every hamlet, many farmers string their own wires from a neighbor’s line or from a transformer post to power irrigation pumps, grain dryers, or field lighting. These improvised circuits rarely carry insulation, grounding, or overload protection. A single bare GI strand laid along a field boundary at ankle height can deliver a lethal current to anyone wading through adjacent waterlogged paddy soil, where moisture dramatically lowers the body’s electrical resistance. Health authorities in the northern districts have repeatedly flagged electrocution as an underreported cause of rural death, particularly among women and children who traverse field boundaries daily.

What Happens Next

With the accused now in RAB-10 custody, the case will proceed through the Goalanda Ghat Police Station docket. Investigators are expected to examine the GI wiring, the excavated pit, and any forensic evidence from the Upazila Health Complex to establish the precise sequence of contact and concealment. The family, which initially accepted the heart-failure explanation before its own search revealed the wire, will likely participate as complainants in the criminal proceeding. RAB-10’s Faridpur unit has indicated it will continue monitoring the area for any additional persons who may have assisted in moving the body or digging the disposal pit.

For the residents of Daulatdia and the wider Goalanda upazila, the incident underscores a narrow margin between the daily act of walking to a field and a fatal encounter with unregulated electricity — a margin that, in this case, was crossed by a woman simply going about her work.