The area tingling with anticipation and exhilaration, came the explosion - one after another. It was meant to be a dream, not a nightmare. COURTESY
It was a regular afternoon when the Awami League activists had massed in front of their central office on Bangabandhu Avenue for a peace rally against terrorism. A makeshift stage was raised on a truck.
Then, the area tingling with anticipation and exhilaration, came the explosion - one after another. It was meant to be a dream, not a nightmare.
Terror rained down upon the gathered activists and press pack. It was an attempt on the life of party chief Sheikh Hasina. The scene of the carnage had mutilated corpses, injured screaming in pain and bloodied activists running around, blood and shoes splattered all over.
That dreadful day 17 years ago happened to be a Saturday in August, another dark day in the political history of Bangladesh. The grenade attack was the second biggest blow to the Awami League, the party that led Bangladesh in the Liberation War, with the biggest one being the assassination of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
Prime Minister Hasina was the opposition leader that time, while the then prime minister of the BNP-Jamaat-e-Islami coalition government, Khaleda Zia, is now serving suspended sentences in corruption cases.
“The killers aimed to leave no leader in the Awami League and hinder the political process in Bangladesh in an effort to establish militancy and autocracy. But the people prevented that,” President Abdul Hamid said in a message commemorating the day. The attack left 24 people dead.
“The first attack on democracy in independent Bangladesh was on Aug 15, 1975. On that day, Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the great architect of the independence of Bangladesh, was killed with his family,” the president said.
“On Nov 3, they killed the four national leaders inside jail. The killers never ceased to attack and tried to kill Bangabandhu’s daughter Awami League chief Sheikh Hasina in a grenade attack on Aug 21, 2004 during an Awami League rally.”
“Besides mutual respect and empathy, it is mandatory to have tolerance when we want to establish a meaningful democracy. I strongly believe that all political parties in Bangladesh will contribute to propel the democratic movement in the country.”
Hasina in her message accused the BNP-Jamaat alliance of “directly patronising” the attack. She said it was the moral obligation of a government to arrest the culprits involved with such a heinous attack. But, the then government “protected the killers and helped a number of attackers leave the country”.
They destroyed the evidence of the incident and in the name of investigation, diverted the heinous incident to other direction. But truth can never be suppressed. Today, it has come out through investigation that many high-ups of the BNP-Jamaat alliance government were directly involved with the attack," said the prime minister.
After 14 years, a tribunal handed down the verdict in the grenade attack case in 2018, sentencing 19 people, including former state minister for home Lutfozzaman Babar and former deputy minister Abdus Salam Pintu, to death. The 19 accused who got life sentence included Khaleda’s son Tarique Rahman and aide Haris Chowdhury.
0 Comments