Murder of Delwoar Hossain

Delwoar Hossain was a 50-year-old Bangladeshi civil engineer, a 1993 graduate of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), who served as executive engineer of Gazipur City Corporation after being transferred there in 2015 from Narayanganj City Corporation. His work involved planning and supervising major road construction projects under a city corporation budget of roughly 550 million USD for the 2019–20 session, and he was also involved in evicting influential land grabbers from city corporation property. According to family members, coworkers, and news sources, Delwoar's refusal to approve contractor payments without proper completion of work, and his resistance to bribery attempts, made him a target of politically influential contractors. In 2019, several city corporation employees faced corruption-related suspensions, and in September 2019 Delwoar himself was made an Officer on Special Duty, a move sources allege was driven by lobbying from contractors; he was reassigned to Konabari in Gazipur in February 2020.

On May 11, 2020, a vehicle with an unfamiliar driver, rather than Delwoar's usual government vehicle, picked him up from his residence in Mirpur, Dhaka. His body was recovered by Turag police the same day at around 3 pm from the Diabari Beribadh area, bearing head injuries, and sent for autopsy to Shaheed Suhrawardy Medical College Hospital. Police recovered his mobile phone from a lake near Bridge no-3 in Diabari and the microbus allegedly used in the killing from Gualanda in Faridpur. Investigators said Delwoar had been suffocated and showed injury marks. He was later buried in his home village of Kazirhat, Noakhali.

Police identified a colleague, Anisur Rahman Selim, as involved via CCTV footage near both men's residences, and said Selim confessed to hiring Helal Howladher Shahin to carry out the killing, assisted by microbus driver Habib Mia; a rickshaw-puller, Rafiqul Islam, was reportedly paid to place a call to Delwoar on the day of the murder and was described as a witness. Police said Shahin strangled Delwoar with a nylon rope inside the moving microbus while Selim sat beside him, after which the body was dumped in Uttara.

Authorities attributed the killing to a workplace feud, a characterization Delwoar's family disputes, saying Selim's confession that he acted because of being scolded does not explain the killing, and alleging pressure from colleagues to approve large contractor payments that Delwoar had refused to sign without investigation. The Institution of Engineers, Bangladesh and Transparency International Bangladesh publicly called for a fuller investigation into possible other participants. Engineers across Bangladesh wore black badges in protest on May 30, 2020, and family members, engineers, and BUET faculty formed a human chain on July 18, 2020, demanding investigation of alleged masterminds; the family said they had received calls warning them not to press for further investigation.