A man has been arrested on suspicion of murdering a mother in broad daylight as she was pushing her baby in a pram.
Police launched a nationwide manhunt for Habibur Masum, 25, a marketing graduate, after Kulsuma Akter, 27, was fatally stabbed while shopping in Bradford city centre on Saturday afternoon.
Relatives of Akter said that her mother has not been able to stop crying since the death of the “wonderful lady”.
The suspect was arrested in the early hours of Tuesday morning in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, more than 170 miles from where the attack took place.
Akter had been shopping with a friend in the Westgate area of Bradford when she was stabbed in front of her child. Witnesses described seeing her body lying on the pavement beside the pram as onlookers screamed.
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Emergency services were called and a local grocer performed CPR but Akter was pronounced dead at the scene, where a knife was found. Her child was unharmed in the incident.
Her brother Hossain said the family was “completely devastated” and that he had to tell their mother in Bangladesh of his sister’s death.
He told Mail Online: “We are heartbroken and completely devastated. We are not even able to speak and have been crying all the time since this happened. We had to call our mother in Bangladesh to tell her the news. Can you imagine what this was like for us? I can’t believe my sister is dead. I’m sorry, I can’t speak any more.”
Expressing the family’s devastation, her cousin Aftab Miah said Akter “was a wonderful lady … a good, humble, likeable person, a caring person”. He told the BBC: “She had a good personality, she used to make people laugh.”
“All we want is justice, nothing else,” he added. “Not revenge or anything, just justice for our sister.”
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Miah said that his cousin had a traditional arranged marriage to Masum just over two years ago in Bangladesh and she accompanied her new husband as a dependent. The couple were living in Oldham in a flat above a shop.
Following the incident, West Yorkshire police said they had launched a large-scale search for Masum, who had been living in the Oldham area and was known to the victim. Members of the public were urged not to approach the suspect, the force saying they did not know if he was armed.
Announcing the arrest on Tuesday morning, Detective Chief Inspector Stacey Atkinson said: “This is a tragic incident in which a mother has lost her life in the most horrific of circumstances. We understand that this has caused a considerable amount of concern in the local community.”
Thames Valley police assisted in the operation to arrest Masum, while the West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester forces said on Monday they had referred themselves to the police watchdog in connection with Akter’s death. Referrals to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) are mandatory when forces have had previous contact with a victim.
Court documents show that Masum was charged with threatening to kill Akter on November 24 last year and assaulting her the previous day. Masum pleaded not guilty to the alleged offences, said to have taken place in Manchester, at a hearing on November 27 at Tameside magistrates’ court.
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Welcoming the IOPC review, Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said: “There have been too many occasions where women have lost their lives in the most terrible circumstances after having contact with, or seeking support from, the police or other parts of the criminal justice system.”
Masum came to the UK after leaving Sylhet in Bangladesh in 2022 to study for a master’s degree in marketing at the University of Bedfordshire. A friend said that Masum was here on a postgraduate student visa.
Masum, whose Facebook profile states that he is married, moved to Greater Manchester after graduating where he began to position himself as an online influencer. He posted videos on social media sites including YouTube showing him discussing the Hamas and Israel dispute, trying on clothes in Primark that were made in Bangladesh, walking in the snow and assembling baby furniture.
His most recent video, published 13 days ago, documented his journey to Barcelona from Manchester. Masum has 3,800 followers on Facebook, where he described himself working for a wedding planning business, and almost 2,000 on Instagram. During their search for Masum, officers raided properties in Burnley, Oldham and Chester and arrested a man aged 23 on suspicion of aiding an offender.
Labour’s Naz Shah lamented what she said was a societal issue with violence against women as she laid a floral tribute at the scene of the attack. The Bradford West MP was joined by Geo Khan, 69, the local greengrocer who attempted to save Akter’s life.
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Shah, who has known Khan, 69, since she was a young girl, said: “There is a problem across society when it comes to violence against women. A woman has lost her life as she is pushing her baby in a pram in broad daylight. There is an issue. There is a culture of, ‘It’s OK to hit a woman, kill a woman’ — and that is not OK.”
Khan said: “I’m still shocked at what happened. I’ve hardly slept.”
He said that Akter, who was wearing black leggings, a floral patterned top and a headscarf, was a previous customer at his store. Another shop worker said that CCTV showed the victim, whose friend had left to go into a store, walking and talking with a man before he stabbed her. Police have seized the footage.
