More than one-third of the doctoral dissertation of the former Inspector General of Police (IGP) Benazir Ahmed is plagiarized, Bangla Outlook found out.

Benazir received a doctorate degree from Dhaka University in 2019 and since then, he started using the title "Doctor" before his name.

However, the dissertation titled “Contribution of Bangladesh United Nation Peace Keeping Force to Our National Economy” that he submitted as defense for his “Doctor of Business Administration” degree has at least 39% plagiarized contents.

Bangla Outlook got a copy of his dissertation and used Turnitin–a widely used plagiarism detector in the academic arena–to find out the authenticity of his thesis work.

The 102-page thesis which was conducted under the supervision of Professor Shibli Rubayat Ul Islam, the then dean of the faculty of Business Studies of Dhaka University (DU), has taken almost 7% of its content directly from peacekeeping.un.org without citing references.

Benzair took 4% of the dissertation content directly from the website of Bangladesh Police–a force which he governed once.

Even the introductory line of the thesis’s abstract is plagiarized, taken from another thesis of DU library.

Academician Dr Shamsul Hoque told Bangla Outlook that if more than one-third of a dissertation is plagiarized contents, then a degree shouldn’t be conferred against such dissertation.

“If you want to earn a doctorate degree, you should put in hard labor, “ said Hoque, a professor of Bangladesh University of Engineering Technology (BUET), “There is no other way around it.”  

Benzair, the beleaguered former IG, who recently came under the scanner of anti-corruption commission (ACC) for amassing huge amounts of wealth also wasn’t qualified to be admitted into the doctoral program of Institute of Business Administration (IBA) of DU.

A report in Prothom Alo found out that the admission requirements were relaxed for him to allow him to enroll into the program.

The report said that to be admitted in the DBA program of the IBA, one must have a bachelor's degree and at least 50% marks in all public examinations throughout their academic life.

Benazir did not meet those requirements.

The basic conditions were relaxed for Benazir's admission upon the recommendation of Professor Shibli Rubayat-Ul-Islam.

He was the supervisor of Benazir's "doctorate" program. In May 2020, he became the Chairman of BSEC and still holds that position.

At the time of admission and receiving the degree, Benazir was the Director General of RAB  and Benazir's position was taken into consideration in relaxing the admission requirements.

According to Benazir Ahmed's DBA degree application, he passed the SSC equivalent examination in 1978 from SM Model High School in Gopalganj with second division.

In 1980, he passed the HSC equivalent examination from Government Jagannath College with second division as well.

Benazir has a BA (Pass) degree from Dhaka University (1982). University teachers say that at that time, this certificate was given to the students of the colleges affiliated with the university. Regular students would get bachelor's degree certificates.

There is no mention of which college Benazir studied in the documents. However, he obtained a master's degree from the English Department of Dhaka University in 1984.

Prothom Alo reported that as per the MA (Pass) certificate, Benazir got 517 out of a total of 1100 marks, which means he got 47% marks.

But in the application for admission to the DBA program, he mentioned that he got 301 marks (60%) out of a total of 500 marks in the degree or equivalent examination. The year mentioned in his BA (Pass) certificate is 1982. In the DBA application, the year is 1983. He did not submit any certificate matching this year.

According to the certificate of the English Department of Dhaka University, Benazir passed his master's degree in 1984 with 229 marks out of 500 (about 46%) in the second division.

However, in the admission application, he showed the total number of marks in the master's degree as 400 instead of 500.

Bangla Outlook contacted Benazir’s supervisor Prof Shibli for comments but he didn’t reply.