A dad-of-two moved to Bangladesh for a better life before ‘jealous’ relatives murdered him in an attack broadcast to his family back home,they have claimed.
Abdul Shahid, 39, was knifed to death in front of his sisters who sat and watched 5,000 miles away in Coventry, they have said.
Mina Majid, 44, is one of his sisters and is a carer in the east Midlands. She told Metro.co.uk: ‘I saw them slashing my brother and I screamed my brother’s name until I couldn’t scream anymore.
‘I didn’t even know that I could scream that loud.’
But no amount of screaming could save Abdul.
His body lay lifeless in the concrete courtyard of his home, his guts spilling out from where his stomach had been slashed.
A man with a phone to his ear stepped over him and walked casually away, not even glancing down at Abdul.
It was all captured on video and shared with Metro.co.uk. But the footage is too graphic to publish.
Abdul, ‘fell in love’ with Bangladesh after visiting his father’s home for the first time in 20 years following his mother’s death in 2019.
It was supposed to be just a two-week holiday, but he decided to stay, renovating the blue house surrounded by trees until it was ‘absolutely beautiful’.
He married a local woman and together they had twin daughters, born just four months ago.
Mina said: ‘He was in his element. He did a lot of charity work, feeding the poor, buying clothes for them.
‘He built houses, he gave to mosques and orphanages. That was his pride and joy.’
She added: ‘A week before my brother’s death, he fed the whole village, he gave food, lentils, rice, oil, onions, he gave packages because of Ramadan.’
But Abdul’s newfound paradise turned into a nightmare as a dispute over property started brewing, according to his sisters.
Relatives in Bangladesh claimed to own part of the property on which Abdul’s house was located, they said.
His bike was slashed.
‘Then it all escalated when they boiled his dog’, Mina said. ‘They literally boiled the brains out of his dog.’
And then the death threats started.
Mina last spoke to her brother over the phone on March 7, during which Abdul reminded her how much he loves her.
Just over two hours later, he was dead.
His wife video called Mina that night as Abdul was subjected to what Mina describes as an ‘ambush’.
People can be heard shouting as they argue in the courtyard of Abdul’s home.
Video footage then shows a group of people swarming Abdul as the sound of clanging metal can be heard.
By the end of the scuffle, Abdul is lying flat on his back, arms outstretched, as blood pours from a knife wound at the side of his stomach.
‘Ten times they slashed his head’, Mina said. ‘Blood splattered everywhere.’
And then, ‘they walked out like he was nothing, like he was a nobody’.
Mina said she knows the identities of the five people who killed Abdul.
But she claims a police investigation has come to nothing due to corruption and the influence of their relatives in the village.
She said police in Bangladesh have searched various addresses, but they have been unable to locate the suspect she says are being hidden from sight.
Now Mina is raising money on Gofundme to pay for another investigation and a reward for anyone who has information that will help deliver justice.
For now, she says, ‘we can’t sleep, we can’t eat’.
A Foreign Office spokesperson confirmed the UK government is ‘supporting the family of a British national who has died in Bangladesh and is in contact with the local authorities’.
But Abdul is not the first UK citizen to die such a violent death in Bangladesh.
Rafiqul Islam, 51, and his 16-year-old son Mahiqul died on their way to hospital after a suspected poisoning in the same region of Bangladesh July 2022.
They and other members of the family, from Cardiff, were found unconscious in their flat in a Sylhet village.
Their daughter Samira, 20, died days later.
Rehana Begum, a 43-year-old mother from east London, was hacked to death with machetes while in Bangladesh in 2013.
A relative was subsequently arrested by police, who were focusing on a rejected marriage proposal as a possible factor in the murder.
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