Author: Md. Hredoy Mesha

Dhaka Metropolitan Police’s own records, reported in May 2026, list 1,280 people actively running extortion rackets across the capital, 148 of them armed. They operate in named groups, each controlling a defined territory, with rates that range from BDT 200 a day from a pavement vendor to BDT 20,000 a month from a business in areas like Gulshan and Banani. This is not an outside estimate or a reconstruction after the fact — it is the police’s own accounting of an economy that runs in daylight, street by street, inside a system whose stated job is to shut it down.…