A significant share of Bangladesh’s illegal cigarette market is controlled by two companies where Chattogram City Corporation (CCC) Councillor Abdus Sabur Liton and his brother have the majority stakes, an investigation by The Daily Star has found.

NRBC Bank’s top managers have great appetites. 

Only a select 27 employees of NRBC Bank were given salary hikes, and that too astonishingly, in 2022 in violation of banking rules as well as NRBC’s own human resources policy

During the 40th board meeting of NRBC Bank on February 7, 2016, current Chairman Tamal Parvez and Director Adnan Imam entered the boardroom accompanied by a man carrying a large gun. Both Tamal and Adnan were board directors back then.

It was a long, dark plot. A chilling conspiracy was getting final touches in an eerie August of 2004, a month that brings to mind the memories of a past bloodbath. The plot for a high-profile assassination was awaiting approval, again.

A syndicate of bureaucrats, politicians and officials of Police Bureau of Investigation (PBI) in Cox’s Bazar have systematically siphoned off Tk 78 crore in public money from three development projects.

Import ban, so what? There are ways to sneak those in, through the country’s main airport even.

Roads and Highways Department (RHD) has failed to start the physical work of a project taken up two years ago for installing 28 axle load control centres despite a call by one of its wings for implementing axle load control on highways ungently to reduce road damages.

Transnational trafficking gangs allegedly backed by some ruling party men have long been using different border points of Jashore to traffic women and children to India.

From political leaders to businessmen, fish traders to poultry farm owners and brickfield workers to tailors -- the professions of 102 yaba godfathers and dealers who surrendered to police on February 16 are as varied as their age.

It is a piece of paper full of lies and yet it is the legal government document that allows a person to drink alcohol in Bangladesh.

Almost every time any government agency tried to ensure accountability and transparency of the duty-free liquor trade, it found itself in a legal limbo. Over the last two decades, diplomatic bonded warehouses, who import duty-free liquor for diplomats and foreigners, filed writ after writ with the High Court challenging the legality of the government action.

Officially, most bars and social clubs neither import nor purchase alcohol yet they log huge sales; restrictive law, high import tariff, bureaucratic nightmare encouraging smuggling; govt loses big, earning almost nothing out of this trade.

Millions are now addicted to the pink pills. They take it as stimulant and end up with organ damage and mental derangement. The Daily Star has prepared a three-part series on the invasion of yaba and is running the third part today.

It was like wooing customers to have kebab and biriyani at popular Bihari restaurants. Only a few steps into the Camper Bazar, youths in small groups were looking for potential customers, holding packets full of pink tablets.

It's called crazy medicine. Produced in Myanmar, the dangerous drug very easily crosses the border and reaches cities, towns and villages of Bangladesh through various channels -- sometimes in full knowledge of law enforcers. It now seems unstoppable and is poised to cripple the country's biggest hope -- the youth.

Every time he extends his hands to seek alms, Sohrab Hossain, 63, looks embarrassed. Begging has never been his livelihood; it is now.

Mukuly Begum literally struggled to take her thirteen-month-old daughter on her lap.

“My arms and legs were tied in such a way that it was impossible for me even to change sides without help,” said Jewel, who was abducted and held captive by human traffickers in November last year.

As legal channels for labour migration from Bangladesh have shrunk due to malpractices in the arrangements by both private agencies and the government, desperate jobseekers take dangerous sea route to Malaysia.