It was just after 10 o’clock on a calm Monday morning when the usual rush outside Dhaka’s National Medical College was shattered by the sound of gunfire. 

Pedestrians scattered as two men on a motorcycle sped away, leaving Tariq Saif Mamun — once an accused in a high-profile murder case — lying critically injured on the pavement. Within minutes, doctors at Dhaka Medical College Hospital declared him dead.

For many, the name Mamun evokes a chapter of the capital’s turbulent underworld of the 1990s and early 2000s — a world where student politics, business disputes and criminal networks often collided. 

Once the president of the Dhanmondi unit of a student body, Mamun had long carried a reputation that straddled both politics and crime.

Last year, he was acquitted in the murder case of film actor Sohel Chowdhury — a killing that had haunted Bangladesh’s entertainment circles for nearly three decades. After years of legal battles, Mamun had walked free, apparently ready to turn the page. But that chapter closed violently this week.

His wife, Ripa, said Mamun had left home in the morning to attend a court hearing in another case. “He was supposed to return home after the hearing,” she told reporters, struggling to contain her grief. “We never thought it would end like this.”

Police said the attack appeared targeted. “Two assailants opened fire at close range,” confirmed Mallik Ahsan Uddin Sami, Deputy Commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police’s Lalbagh Division. “Mamun was a listed top criminal. We are investigating possible motives, including old rivalries.”

Family members, however, insist that Mamun had been trying to distance himself from his past. His brother-in-law said Mamun had been focusing on personal matters after being cleared of the Sohel Chowdhury case.

As police sift through CCTV footage and witness accounts, the streets outside National Medical College have returned to their usual pace. But for Mamun’s family — and for many who remember his tumultuous past — the echoes of those gunshots linger as yet another story of a life once spared by the courts, but not by fate.

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