The Rautahat District Court has remanded Mahatab Alam, a suspect of the Rautahat brick kiln killings in which at least two persons were allegedly burnt alive and many others were injured 13 years ago, in judicial custody.

A single bench of Judge Maniram Neupane on Sunday gave its verdict to send Mahatab to judicial custody stating that the suspect does not seem innocent based on the evidence available.

Mahatab is the younger brother of Nepali Congress leader Mohammad Aftab Alam who was arrested by police in October 2019 for his involvement in the Rautahat killing. Security personnel, in coordination with the Indian police, had detained Mahatab from Motihari in the Indian state of Bihar and brought him to Rautahat last week. Mahatab had gone into hiding after the arrest of his brother in 2019. Security personnel took Mahatab under control while he was meeting his son in Motihari.

“Following the court’s ruling, Mahatab was sent to the district prison in Gaur on Sunday,” said DIG Dhiraj Pratap Singh, chief at the Provincial Police Office in Janakpur. The charges of attempted murder and holding and transporting explosive materials have been registered against 11 people involved in the Rautahat brick kiln killing. Police claimed that the Alam brothers were the masterminds behind the incident.

In 2008, a day before the elections of the Constituent Assembly-I, a blast took place at a shed in Rajpur Municipality, Rautahat. A charge sheet was then filed against Alam and his men for allegedly throwing Trilok Pratap Singh and Osi Akhtar into the kiln’s furnace after the blast. The suspects were charged with burning injured people alive in the brick kiln to destroy evidence.

Following the incident, Trilok’s father Shrinarayan Singh and Akhtar’s mother Roksana Khatun had filed complaints against Alam and his accomplices. Alam and three others had been arrested a few months after the explosion but they were later released. An unidentified group gunned down Khatun in 2011.

Former minister Alam, who was elected to the federal parliament from Rautahat-2 in the 2017 elections, is in judicial custody in Nakkhu jail. Police have so far arrested five persons in connection to the blast. Three of them are now in judicial custody while two were freed on bail, said police.