A former Army officer has been arrested and put on remand in the sensational Sohagi Jahan Tonu murder case.

The arrestee was identified as Hafizur Rahman, former senior warrant officer of Bangladesh Army.

A team of the Police Bureau of Investigation (PBI) arrested him after conducting a drive at his Keraniganj residence in Dhaka on Tuesday night, said investigating officer (IO) of the case Inspector Tariqul Islam.

Tonu murder: Court orders DNA cross-match of 3 suspects

Hafizur was taken to Cumilla and produced before the Cumilla Chief Judicial Magistrate Md Mominul Haque on Wednesday afternoon with a seven-day remand prayer.

After the hearing, the court placed him on a three-day remand in the murder case.

On April 6, the same court ordered the authorities concerned to conduct a cross-matching of DNA profiles of three former Army personnel with those earlier collected from the clothing of Tonu, a Cumilla Govt Victoria College student who was killed in 2016.

The order came following a petition filed by the IO.

According to IO Tariqul Islam, DNA profiles had previously been extracted from Tonu’s personal clothing soon after the incident. However, those samples were never matched with any suspects at the time.

Tonu, a second-year student of the history department at Victoria College, went missing on March 20, 2016, after leaving for private tuition inside Cumilla Cantonment.

Her body was later recovered from a nearby forest area, prompting her father Yar Hossain to file a murder case at Cumilla Kotwali Model Police Station.

The case has since seen multiple changes of investigating agencies, moving from local police to the Detective Branch, then Criminal Investigation Department, and later to the PBI, but no breakthrough has been achieved so far.

Family members have long alleged a lack of transparency in the investigation, claiming that earlier DNA tests were conducted but their results were never made public.

Tariqul is the seventh officer to lead the probe.