The unclaimed face: 24 years after Tinni’s murder

Before the burial, someone at the morgue of Mitford hospital photographed her face. It was a precaution against the day a relative might come asking.

In November 2002 that one frame stood between a young woman and a grave with no name on it, and it took five days to do its work.

Her name was Syeda Tania Mahbub Tinni, and there were other photographs of that face. She had been shopping in Banani when the film-maker Afzal Hossain noticed her and suggested modelling. She was reading English at Eden College at the time, agreed, and was working within a few months.

Her first television commercial was for a skin cream, and others followed. Her smile went up on billboards across the big cities, and she acted in a few television plays. Those pictures were made to be looked at by everyone.

The one taken at the morgue was made in case anyone came looking.

For five days, no one who saw her knew her. Those who handled the body did not know whose it was. One report describes crushing wounds and a blow to the skull from a blunt object, and a body that could not be recognised.

The woman on the table was a familiar face in Bangladeshi advertising and the mother of a daughter of eighteen months. To the people responsible for establishing who she was, she was a stranger.

The body had been found in the small hours of November 11, beside the eleventh pillar of Chin-Maitri Bridge No. 1, where the Buriganga runs past Keraniganj. Later that day an assistant sub-inspector, Mohammad Safi Uddin, registered a murder case against persons unknown.

It was a case with no named victim and no named suspect. The body went to Mitford, where a post-mortem was carried out on a woman nobody could name. No one came to claim her, and Anjuman Mufidul Islam, the charity that buries the city's unidentified dead, buried her at Jurain.

The morgue photograph was put on file.

On November 16 the picture appeared in the daily Janakantha. By then she was already in the ground. Relatives saw it and knew her. Her uncle, Syed Rezaul Karim, went to Keraniganj police station and lodged a general diary entry.

The grave was opened again, and the family confirmed it was her. They had known her first from a page of newsprint, and then they had to be sure at a grave dug for an unnamed body. The same account notes that if the photograph had not run, no one might have learned whose body it was.

Without it she would have stayed where she was, among the city's unidentified dead. The case went to the CID before the month was out.

What became of the family afterwards can be pieced together from a handful of press retrospectives, and they agree on one point: the killing broke the household apart.

Her father, who spent his working life abroad, is reported to live alone in Bangladesh. Her mother is said to be in Pakistan. A younger sister, an air hostess, has her own life to run. The daughter who was eighteen months old is reportedly living overseas with her father. None of the reports quotes any of them.

The case was never theirs to begin, either. A policeman had filed it before anyone knew who she was, and it remained the state's case to the end. Even her first burial, the one that should have belonged to them, was carried out by strangers on the city's behalf, and by the time the family knew to come, it was done.

Then came the wait. Police filed a charge sheet in November 2008, six years on, against one man, Golam Faruk Abhi, a former Jatiya Party MP, and it described him as absconding in Canada. When the trial was ordered in 2010, the court appointed a lawyer at state expense to defend him.

The prosecution alleged that he had never given her the standing of a wife, that he planned her killing when she pressed him to marry her, and that he left her body at the bridge after bringing it there by car. He was the only person tried.

In 2021 the verdict date was pushed back several times. In January 2025 the court acquitted him, holding that the state had failed to prove the charge. More than twenty-two years had passed. An acquittal is a finding about proof.

It does not say who killed her, only that the state had not shown it was him. The child who was eighteen months old when her mother died had, by then, grown to roughly the age her mother had been.

As the record stands, nobody answers for her death.

In print she has stayed 'model Tinni' for twenty-four years, the label arriving in the headline ahead of her name. A retrospective published in recent months cast her as a star lost to a mirage of romance.

Both labels are short, and both leave out most of her: a young woman who had been reading English at Eden College when she was first noticed, a mother, a niece whose family had to stand at a reopened grave to be certain.

The photograph that named her was kept for whoever might come looking. Someone did. Her body was claimed after five days. Twenty-four years on, her killing still has no owner.

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Mahmud Newaz Joy is a freelance feature writer