A case has now been filed over the attack on content creator Salman Muqtadir's BrownFish studio in Dhaka's ECB Chattar area. It names 13 people and a further 150 to 200 unnamed accused.
Who filed it, and where
The complainant is New Gini Properties Ltd, the housing project on whose land the studio stood. The case was lodged at Cantonment police station on Saturday night, according to Dhaka Metropolitan Police Cantonment zone assistant commissioner Nazmul Ahsan.
Three people are in custody. Two were detained at the scene; a third was picked up later, on Sunday, from the Bhasantek area. Police have recovered locally-made weapons, and — according to the account given at the home ministry's press briefing — bullet casings as well. Officers reached the site after a call to 999.
The police account of what happened
The dispute is over a 35-katha plot inside the housing project. Police say the people involved had been unable to get access to the land, and later arrived with outsiders to take possession of it, entering the property through a gate.
BrownFish stood in the middle of that disputed land. On the police account it was wrecked apparently unintentionally. "They did not know that it was Salman Muqtadir's studio," the DMP official said. "They came with people and vandalised that as well."
Asked directly about the extortion claim made on the night, the assistant commissioner was unambiguous: "It is a land dispute and there is no issue of extortion."
At the ministry briefing, the ownership dispute was described as running between the builders' group and a retired senior military officer, over land in the Manikdi area under Cantonment police station. It was also said that the preliminary inquiry had been brief and that a fuller investigation is still needed.
What is settled and what is not
Three things are now on the record and are not in dispute: a case exists, three people are held, and weapons were recovered at the scene. Everything else — who organised the group, whether the studio's destruction was incidental or not, and what the dispute over the plot actually rests on — is what the investigation is for.
It is worth keeping the stages apart. A detention is not a charge, naming someone in a complaint is not proof, and 150 to 200 unnamed accused is a figure that describes a crowd rather than an identified set of people. That distinction, and how a complaint travels from a police station to a courtroom, is set out in our explainer on how a case moves through a Bangladeshi court.
The night itself, and the account given by the two employees who were inside when the shutters came down, is in our earlier report.
