An innocent Bangladeshi man who spent a full year behind bars following a catastrophic case of mistaken identity is finally set to regain his freedom after intervention by the High Court.

In a landmark ruling delivered on Sunday, a High Court bench comprising Justice J. B. M. Hassan and Justice Aziz Ahmed Bhuiyan ordered the immediate release of Md Almas, who had been serving a 10-year prison sentence in place of a convicted convict with a nearly identical name. The order has been directly conveyed to the relevant prison authorities to ensure his prompt execution of release.

The ordeal traces back more than two decades to an arms-related criminal case filed with the Mirpur Police Station on 10 April 2002 against Md Almach, then aged 24, and Md Nazmul Alam Mamun, aged 22. On 19 June 2004, the Dhaka Metropolitan Special Tribunal-11 delivered its verdict, acquitting Mamun while sentencing Almach to 10 years of rigorous imprisonment under the Arms Act. At the time of the judgement, Almach was absconding, prompting the tribunal to issue an arrest warrant and a conviction warrant against him.

Fast-forward to November 2024, law enforcement officers acted upon an updated conviction warrant issued on 20 March 2024. However, instead of apprehending the actual convict, police arrested Md Almas, whose father is Sheikh Khalil. Produced before a local court on 5 November 2024, Almas was remanded to custody and has remained incarcerated ever since.

Unwilling to accept his unjust detention, Almas filed a writ petition with the High Court challenging his imprisonment on the grounds of administrative error and mistaken identity. Following a preliminary hearing, the High Court issued a rule on 6 September and mandated a rigorous judicial inquiry to verify the true identities of both the prisoner and the absconding convict. The court directed the Chief Judicial Magistrate of Dhaka to oversee the investigation through a Senior Judicial Magistrate, stipulating that a comprehensive inquiry report be submitted within 45 days.

The investigative report, recently submitted to the High Court and formally reviewed today, conclusively established that the incarcerated Almas was entirely innocent and had no involvement in the 2002 arms case. Crucially, the inquiry revealed that the actual convict, Md Almach, had long fled the country and is currently residing in Canada.

The official inquiry pinpointed three critical administrative blunders that led to this systemic failure:

• Geographical and Postal Confusion: Before 2007, the innocent Almas lived with his family in Bahra village under the Dakshin Bahra post office in Dohar Upazila, Dhaka. The actual convict hailed from Purba Dhowair village, which shares the exact same post office. Local conversational conventions of citing the post office name created initial geographical ambiguity.

• Striking Similarity in Paternal Names: The father of the convicted man is Md Khalilur Rahman (often referred to simply as Khalil), whereas the father of the wrongly detained Almas is Sheikh Khalil. This close resemblance severely blurred identity verification checks.

• Typographical Errors in Court Records: In the original 2002 case documents, the address of the accused convict Almach was erroneously recorded as “Dakshin Bahra” instead of “Purba Dhowair”. This glaring error persisted uncorrected across decades of court documentation, ultimately making its way into the conviction warrant executed by the police in 2024.

Following the submission of the judicial inquiry, the writ petition was placed on the High Court’s daily cause list for orders today. Advocate Md Tanvir Ahmed and Advocate Abdullah Abu Sayeed presented the arguments on behalf of the petitioner, while Deputy Attorney General Shihab Uddin Khan and Assistant Attorney General Mohiuddin Md Hanif represented the state.

The judicial intervention caps off a harrowing period for Almas, whose plight first gained widespread public attention following a national media expose detailing how a ordinary citizen spent nearly ten months in jail simply because his name mirrored that of an international fugitive. With the High Court’s decisive ruling today, his year-long wrongful confinement officially draws to a close.