Bangladesh's elite anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion troops have raided a craft shop in a posh locality in Dhaka in search of Rabindranath Tagore's Nobel Prize medallion that went missing from Shantiniketan in 2004, officials said on Tuesday.
"Overhearing a telephonic conversation, we raided the handicraft shop in Gulshan area and detained one person for interrogation," said RAB commanding officer Wing Commander Sultan Mohammad Nurani
He said that interrogations were underway and the RAB was trying to gather information about the whereabouts of the medal of Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1913.
Nurani, however, said that they were yet to ascertain if the medal, stolen from Shantiniketan three years ago, was currently in Bangladesh.
Another RAB official said that they have raided Rokhshana Pearls Handicrafts in Gulshan, arrested its owner Abul Hossain and launched a manhunt for two other suspects.
The Nobel medallion was stolen from a museum, part of the Visva Bharati University which was founded by Tagore in 1921. The Nobel medal for literature and certificate as well as some personal possessions were taken from a locked glass showcase in the museum.
Sweden's Nobel Foundation, however, offered two replicas of the stolen Nobel medallion to the Visva-Bharati University in 2005.
The West Bengal government had handed over the missing medallion case to the Central Bureau of Investigation, which abandoned the search after a two-year futile exercise.
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