Minor Hindu girl raped and murdered in Chattogram, Bangladesh; body hung to stage suicide

Case ID : d326eaf | Location : Chittagong District, Bangladesh | Date of Incident : Mon, 5 January, 2026

Case ID : d326eaf

Chittagong District, Bangladesh

5 January, 2026

Minor Hindu girl raped and murdered in Chattogram, Bangladesh; body hung to stage suicide

Attack resulting in death

Attacked for Hindu identity

Case Summary

In the Panir Tanki Pahar area of Lalkhan Bazar, Chattogram, Bangladesh, a 12-year-old Hindu girl was found raped and murdered inside her home. Furthermore, her body was hung inside the home to stage it as a suicide. According to reports, the victim was a fourth-grade student at Lalkhan Bazar Government Primary School and lived with her mother, Rosy Ghosh, and younger brother. Her father, Tapan Ghosh, worked as a security guard at the Karnaphuli Export Processing Zone and stayed on the KEPZ premises, visiting the family once or twice a month. The victim's mother stated that her children, including the victim, usually stayed at her father-in-law's house near her house and on 6 January 2025, the victim was at her grandfather's house. On the night of 6 January 2026, the victim returned home alone around 10:00 pm from her grandfather’s house while her mother was at work. Approximately thirty minutes later, when her grandfather brought her younger brother back to the house, he found the door ajar and discovered the victim hanging from the bamboo ceiling. Her feet were still resting on the bed, a detail that immediately contradicted the possibility of suicide. Police recovered the body and sent it to Chattogram Medical College Hospital for post-mortem examination. During the investigation, a dark bruise was observed around her neck, which further demonstrated murder rather than suicide, with no other visible external injuries noted at that time. An unnatural death case was filed by her maternal uncle, Rana Das, and police stated that they awaited the post-mortem report to determine the exact cause of death. The circumstances of the victim's death indicated a grave act of sexual violence and murder carried out in her own house. During the late-night hours, she was raped and killed, after which her body was deliberately hung to fabricate a narrative of suicide. The staging of the scene, particularly the position of her feet on the bed, reinforced that her body was hanged after her death. As of the date of writing this report, the investigation was ongoing. A fresh wave of anti-Hindu violence prevailed across Bangladesh following the death of Sharif Osman Bin Hadi. This escalation occurred against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Hindu violence that had persisted since the ouster of the Sheikh Hasina government in August 2024, during which Hindu homes, temples, and religious spaces were repeatedly attacked, and the Hindu community faced intimidation, arson, and mob attacks. In the aftermath of Hadi’s death, Hindu homes were selectively targeted and set ablaze in multiple localities by Muslim mobs, forcing families to flee and rendering many homeless. The violence was not sporadic but patterned, with Muslim mobs targeting Hindu neighbourhoods, properties, and religious symbols with impunity. One of the many victims of this wave of violence was a Hindu man named Dipu Chandra Das, who was brutally lynched by a Muslim mob over false allegations of blasphemy. Such targeting of innocent Hindus over fabricated charges illustrated the vulnerability of the Hindu minority under conditions of rising communal hostility. Posters and written materials calling for the extermination of Hindus were displayed in public spaces, signalling an alarming normalisation of genocidal rhetoric. Combined with acts of physical violence, arson, and vandalism, these developments demonstrated a coordinated campaign designed to terrorise the Hindu community and assert Islamic dominance. Notably, Sharif Osman Bin Hadi was a Muslim political activist and student leader known for his anti-Hindu and anti-India stance. He was actively involved in the political unrest that followed the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government and was killed in Dhaka in December 2025 during clashes, after which Hindus were blamed and subsequently targeted.

Why it is Hate Crime ?

This case has been added to the tracker under the primary category- Attack resulting in Death. The subcategory selected is- Attacked for Hindu identity. In several cases, Hindus are attacked merely for their Hindu identity without any perceived provocation. A classic example of this category of religiously motivated hate crime is a murder in 2016. 7 ISIS terrorists were convicted for shooting a school principal in Kanpur because they got ‘triggered’ seeing the Kalava on his wrist and tilak that he had put. In this, the Hindu victim had offered no provocation except for his Hindu religious identity. The motivation for the murder was purely religious, driven by religious supremacy. Such cases where Hindus are targeted merely for their religious identity would be documented as a hate crime. Under this category, cases where the attack led to the death of the Hindu victim/s would be documented. This case constitutes a clear instance of a religiously motivated crime, as a minor Hindu girl was subjected to sexual violence, murdered inside her own home, and her body was deliberately hung to fabricate a false narrative of suicide in Bangladesh, a country that is experiencing sustained and well-documented persecution of Hindus. The brutality of the crime, coupled with the attempt to conceal it, reflected not only criminal intent but also a broader environment of hostility and dehumanisation directed at Hindu victims. The killing did not occur in isolation; it reflected deep-seated hatred tied to the victim's faith in a nation gripped by anti-Hindu hostility. While some may argue that the case details do not explicitly indicate a religious motive. However, the broader context of anti-Hindu persecution in Bangladesh cannot be ignored. When there is an ongoing ethnic cleansing based on religious identity, every crime in and of itself is assumed to be motivated by the same religious animosity, even if there is a lack of a specific religious marker in the immediate crime. During an ongoing ethnic cleansing, the dehumanisation of people based on their religious identity and the normalisation of religious hostility drive the crimes committed against them, even when there is a lack of stated religious motive. For the purpose of documenting the 2024 ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Bangladesh and the subsequent ongoing persecution following the death of Osman Hadi, the Hinduphobia Tracker assumes religious motivation from the outset. If any case is proven beyond a reasonable doubt to stem from motivations other than religious hostility, it will be removed from the hate crime database post-facto. In this case, the severity of the violence inflicted upon a minor Hindu girl, including rape, murder, and the calculated staging of her death as suicide, underscored the extreme vulnerability of Hindu children within the prevailing climate of religious hatred. The concealment of the crime through deliberate staging further demonstrated how such acts are carried out with impunity. Notably, this murder occurred just days after a Hindu man, Dipu Chandra Das, fell victim to a brutal killing by a Muslim mob in Bhaluka town, Bangladesh, on 18 December 2025, over a false blasphemy allegation against Islam. This repeated pattern of attacks on Hindus shows that the present case forms part of the same cycle, where Hindus are targeted and subjected to religiously motivated violence. In this case, even though the perpetrators' identities remain unknown, the religiously motivated nature of the crime is clearly evident. Henceforth, this case is being added to the hate crime database of the Hinduphobia Tracker.