A life for a smartphone?

A 13-year-old boy left home with his mother’s iPhone to meet friends at around 3:00pm yesterday. Today, his body was found in a jungle at Lalmai Pahar in Cumilla, with injury marks on his head.

Police are yet to establish why Ishiat Shahriar Opratim was killed. But police and university teachers have preliminarily suspected that the phone may have been the motive. The iPhone has not been recovered yet. That possibility alone is disturbing.

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Opratim was the only son of Nahida Begum, an associate professor at Comilla University, and businessman KM Firoz Shahriar. He was a class-seven student at Comilla Border Guard Public School.

His father filed a general diary after the family failed to locate him, while his mother appealed on social media for help. Police reviewed CCTV footage overnight. The search ended the next afternoon with the discovery of his body.

What kind of society are we living in when a possession -- a phone, a few thousand taka or anything else -- can become valuable enough for someone to take a life?

We read reports of mugging, robbery, and snatching almost every day. Sometimes the object is a phone, sometimes a bag, or some cash. For readers, one incident can easily blur into the next. For the person attacked, and for the family left behind, there is nothing routine about it.

If the suspicion in Opratim’s case proves correct, someone may have taken the life of a 13-year-old for a device that can be replaced. But this is not simply about greed. It is also about how easily a crime over property can turn into fatal violence, and how safe people are when they step outside their homes.

For us, Opratim may become another headline on a busy news day. We may read the story, feel shocked and move on. For his parents, this is the moment life changes forever.

And Opratim’s case does not exist in isolation from a broader concern about children’s safety. Ain o Salish Kendra’s media-based monitoring recorded 254 child deaths across Bangladesh between January and August this year. Of them, 110 were children aged 13 to 18. In 36 cases, the bodies of children who had earlier gone missing were later recovered. The cases occurred in different circumstances and should not be equated with Opratim’s, but the numbers are difficult to ignore.

His death should make us ask a harder question: how safe are children when they leave home for something as ordinary as meeting friends? And how safe do the rest of us feel carrying a phone, a wallet or a bag on the street?

There is no way to remove every risk from public life. But people should not have to accept the possibility that an ordinary possession could make them a target for violence. Police need to identify those responsible for Opratim’s death and establish the motive. Beyond this case, law enforcement also has to prevent robbery, snatching and similar crimes from becoming an accepted part of everyday life.

No material possession should ever be worth a human life. Yet saying that is the easy part. The harder task is ensuring that people can move through their neighbourhoods, cities and campuses without having to think of such violence as normal.

Opratim was 13. He left home to meet friends. Whatever the investigation finally establishes about the motive, that should remain at the centre of the story.

A phone can be replaced. A life cannot.

And if the suspicion surrounding his death turns out to be true, the most troubling fact will not be that an iPhone was stolen. It will be that someone may have decided it was worth killing a child for.