Staff Correspondent

Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) arrested nine members of a train ticket black marketing syndicate, including an official of shohoz.com, the ticket-selling partner of Bangladesh Railway.

The arrestees are Shohoz official Mizan Dhali, 48, the alleged kingpin of the syndicate; his nephew Sohel Dhali, 30; Md Sumon, 39; Jahangir Alam, 49; Shahjalal Hossain, 42; Md Rasel, 24; Joynal Abedin, 46; Sabur Hawlader, 40; and Newton Biswas, 40.

Khandker Al Moin, RAB'S Legal and Media Wing Director, told this at a press briefing at RAB media centre in the capital on Friday.

He said a RAB team with the help of members of National Security Intelligence arrested them from Kamalapur and Sabujbagh areas of the capital on Thursday night. They also recovered illegally collected train tickets from the possession of the arrestees.

The RAB official said that Mizan joined Kamalapur railway station branch of Daffodil, which was the ticket-selling partners of railway, as office staff in 2003. Later joined CNS.bd as experienced official and then stayed with the Shohoz.com from 2020.

During the time, he developed strong relationships with agents and ticket counters at various railway stations nationwide. This helped him to form the syndicate. Mizan and Sohel had the passwords to a lot of users' accounts with which they booked tickets online and from ticket counters, the Rab official said.

During primary interrogation, the arrestees confessed their involvement in train ticket black marketing. The arrestees also admitted to selling those tickets at two to three times higher than the actual price and this gang used to black market around 500 tickets daily.

RAB official Moin said that they have information on transactions worth Tk one crore in various mobile banking accounts of the syndicate.

The syndicate has targeted to make a big profit in the upcoming Eid-ul-Fitr, Rab said.