(ABC 6 News) – It was November 26, 1999, when an Olmsted County highway worker on the outskirts of Rochester discovered two garbage bags in the ditch containing the decapitated bodies of a woman and child.

Shortly after, Iqbal Ahmed fled to Bangladesh while law enforcement connected the bodies to the disappearance of his wife Mary Zaman and her three-and-a-half-year-old nephew Mohammed Taef.

In 2001, authorities in Minnesota charged Ahmed with two counts of second-degree murder and a warrant was issued for his arrest should he return to the U.S.

In 2005 Ahmed was sentenced for the abduction and murder of two more people in Bangladesh.

“And I think he is a dangerous individual and I am pleased he is not going to be roaming the earth as long as he is incarcerated in Bangladesh,” said then Olmsted County Sheriff Steve Borchardt.

Back in 2005 Ahmed said he’s innocent in the U.S. killings. Bangladesh doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States, which meant Ahmed’s case in Olmsted County lay dormant until recently.

The Olmsted County Attorney’s Office filed a Warrant Review Notice as recently as November 2023. This gives them three options one is to keep the warrant open, another is to dismiss the case outright, and the third is to recall it.

“Bangladesh is not the easiest place to get information out of and we just have never been able to get that closure that we really want in order to just close the file. until then we are just going to ask the court to keep it open,” said Olmsted County Attorney Mark Ostrem.

Ostrem said they chose to keep the case open and review it in five more years.

“What we need is some sort of proof about any of that– if he’s in prison in Bangladesh we’d like to know that. If he’s dead, we’d like to know that. if he’s in another country we’d like to know that so we can go get him,” said Ostrem.

Over the years, Ostrem says that they have had some hits on the case, with new information about Ahmed.

“It’s just one of those things where we need to keep those things active just in case. every once in a while, you hear about a cold case that gets resolved and we would like this to be one of them eventually,” said Ostrem.

Captain Tim Parkin with the Olmsted County Sheriff’s Office says that the case will remain open indefinitely and that the sheriff’s office has not been able to validate Ahmed as deceased and that they have no update at the moment.