Rahman has been missing from New York since Dec. 8.
AB Wire
Search is going on for a Bangladeshi American nurse from Bellevue Hospital Center, New York, Mahfuza Rahman, 30, who has been missing since Dec. 8, 2015, but her husband told her colleagues she had a family emergency and need to take time off from work.
The Daily News reported Rahman was last seen leaving Bellevue on Dec. 8. Soon after, according to a police official, her husband, Mohammad Chowdhury, told Rahman’s Bellevue colleagues she had flown back to her native Bangladesh to care for her parents, who were injured in an accident.
He told their Bronx neighbors the same thing, the official said, and later told them he, too, was going to Bangladesh and that he was taking the couple’s daughter with him.
“He even asked neighbors to check in on the house,” the official said.
But when Rahman didn’t return to work last week — the time her husband had said she would — concerned Bellevue authorities notified hospital police and the NYPD was called. On Friday, police went to the family’s Bedford Park home on E. 198th St. and started asking questions.
On Sunday, they started digging up concrete at the home to look for any evidence of foul play. A police dog was also brought in, the Daily News reported.
“Right now, it’s a missing person investigation,” the official said. “We don’t have any evidence of foul play. She could have just left.”
But a police source said there is concern that Rahman was the victim of a crime. The source said investigators find it odd that Rahman never called her employer. A second source said detectives are trying to get warrants to look through the family’s financial records. Another source said the rooms inside the single-family home had been recently painted, reported the Daily News.
Detectives zoned in on a room in her Norwood home after a dog from the NYPD’s canine unit picked up a suspicious scent, reported the New York Post.
“Crime-scene [investigators] are looking at a second-story back room today,” a source said on Monday, according to the Post.
Neighbors on Monday said they saw the dad each day take the daughter, believed to be 9 years old, to a nearby public school.
Jose Morales, who lives next door and helped do the cement work for the patio — before Rahman disappeared — said she kept to herself and that her husband “seemed all right.”
“They were happy,” he said, the Daily News reported. “They didn’t even argue.”
CBS reported a neighbor as saying she was “very nervous.”
“I’m very concerned,” said a neighbor named Lisha. “I feel like very nervous right now about it — a bad feeling.”
Another neighbor CBS spoke to, said he spoke to the woman’s husband several months ago, and she said he has not seen the couple or their daughter since.
“On December 15th, he told me, ‘Watch my house, I got to go to my country for two weeks.’ That’s it. That’s the last time,” said next-door neighbor Jose Garcia.
Garcia asked Rahman’s husband said the purpose of his trip was “vacation.”
According to her LinkedIn page, Rahman studied chemistry at Bangladesh’s University of Dhaka, then obtained her associate’s degree at LaGuardia Community College in Queens before attending Hunter College to study nursing. She graduated in January 2014 with a bachelor’s degree, according to an online commencement program.