The Crime Desk: The police want to create a database by storing updated information, including the political ideology of senior government officials. The Internal Affairs Department of the Special Branch (SB) of the police has written to police superintendents across the country to collect information for that database. However, there have been mixed reactions among government officials regarding this letter.
In a letter sent by the Special Branch to the district police superintendents regarding sending updated information on government officials from grade five and above, it is said that the Special Branch is one of the main intelligence agencies of the Bangladesh Police. It collects the most reliable information through a wide network across the country. However, due to the lack of proper steps to maintain the collected information in a systematic manner, there is a delay in preparing and sending intelligence reports immediately. In the current competitive situation, all the intelligence agencies of the country are emphasizing timely strategic intelligence management. The Special Branch has also taken the initiative to create a complete database of important information of the state by coordinating all the field-level units to bring dynamism to the work.
The letter further mentioned that in this situation, it is requested to send the information of government officials (grade 5 and above) who have permanent addresses in the area under your jurisdiction on an urgent basis according to the prescribed table for insertion in the central database of the Special Branch.
Information has been sought on 12 topics in the prescribed table. They are the full name of the concerned official, father, mother, and wife or husband’s name. BCS batch number. Official of any ministry, organization, or department. His/her position and title. Current and permanent address. Date of birth, mobile number, and NID number. Believes in any political ideology. Positive and negative information should be given. If there is any information related to cases or GDs, it should also be given. Then there is a space for comments.
Several officials, who did not wish to be named, said that the Ministry of Public Administration is the ministry that supervises government officials. Only they can ask for this information, no one else. If the police are specifically asked to collect information from this ministry, then the information is collected in this way.
No statement was received from the police on this issue. However, a responsible official at the police headquarters, who did not wish to be named, said, “This is not a complicated matter. The job of various intelligence agencies of the police is to collect information.” He believes that this has been requested only to speed up the work.
Generally, all the information of government officials is kept in the Ministry of Public Administration. Which is known as their supervising ministry. When asked about this, Additional Secretary of the Administration Division of this ministry, Md. Mahbub-ul-Alam, said, “This is not the way to collect any information from government officials. Specific information is only requested in the case of an official’s promotion. It is not the case to ask for it in bulk.”
