Cover Story

Death on Bangabandhu Avenue

AASHA MEHREEN AMIN and AHMEDE HUSSAIN

August 21, Saturday. Rani Begum left her Hazaribagh home at 3:25 in the afternoon and led a procession towards the Bangabandhu Avenue. Like other fellow Awami League (AL) workers, who gathered in the thousands in the area, Rani was without any clue of what was in the offing. The festive look of the venue changed immediately after party chief Sheikh Hasina finished her speech.

A truck was used as the podium; and when Hasina was coming down the stairs, photojournalists requested her to pause for some photos. As soon as she stopped, a grenade was hurled at the truck from a nearby building. Her personal security staff Mahabubur Rahman jumped in front of the leader to save her from any possible sniper attack. A bullet hit his head and Mahabub died instantly. Within minutes the road turned into a killing field.

"Both grenades and bullets started pouring like rain from the rooftop besides Ramna Bhaban," says Moti Miah, a survivor of the mayhem.

Meanwhile, other top-ranking AL leaders, even those who were injured, formed a human shield to protect their leader from any further blasts. About 15 more grenades were lobbed at the dais; eighteen AL activists died while hundreds, including most of the top leaders, were injured. Rani Begum was sitting besides the truck with most of the women activists. Rani even remembers offering peanuts to the party's women's affairs secretary Ivy Rahman. "After the first grenade was thrown I saw Ivy apa (Ivy Rahman) lying in a pool of blood on the podium," she says. Rani could not remember more.

But Moti miraculously remained unhurt. "Probably the prayers of elders in my family saved me," says Moti. He ran towards the Osmani Udyan and saw Hasina, in a blood-soaked sari, being taken away to her car. According to Sheikh Hasina's political secretary Saber Hossain Chowdhury, at least seven rounds of sniper shots were fired at the opposition leader's Mercedes. "Snipers were kept by the killers in case the grenade attack failed," he told journalists. "I am quite sure that they are professional marksmen. But when they realised that they were shooting at a bullet-proof vehicle, they stopped shooting and lobbed another grenade at the rear window of the car," he continued.

The grenade made a small hole on the windowpane of the leader of the opposition's car; but the driver with sheer luck ran the vehicle through the carnage and Hasina was home within minutes. Hasina escaped death although television reports have stated that she is suffering from loss of hearing due to an injury in her ear.

Rani, meanwhile, remained unconscious on the pavement for about an hour before she was sent to Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH). The Emergency Ward of the DMCH on August 21 was reminiscent of hospitals of war ravaged Iraq. The DMCH, which has never had the capability to face such crisis, was in total pandemonium. Scarcity of doctors and paramedics has never been so evident before. Rani was left on the floor of Ward 35 of the DMCH with grave injuries to both of her legs. "I saw her lying on the street on the news of 'I channel' and I rushed to the medical college and found her lying unattended on the floor," says Musa, Rani's brother-in-law.

The health minister Khondokar Mosharraf Hossain promised "proper treatment" for the wounded on the same news programme Musa watched. But in reality, the acute shortage of blood; medicine; and the lack of timely treatment forced most of the injured to leave the government-run hospital to private clinics.

Rani, however, is still at Ward 32, but is not sure for how long. "The doctors say only her left leg is in a critical condition. But Rani has been telling me that she can still feel the presence of splinters in her body," Musa says.

Rani is in shock; "I don't know why they hate us so much, I really don't know," she says. Blood still spews out of Rani's right leg; she puts her thumb and index finger on it as if to stop the bleeding; "The last thing I remember is Ivy apa's face," Rani continues. She does not know that Ivy Rahman at that time was on life support, two of her legs already amputated and with slim chances of survival. Rahman was declared dead on Tuesday August 24 at the CMH, when her vital functions stopped functioning while on life support. Ivy Rahman, the AL Women's Affairs Secretary, had been trying to help Sheikh Hasina down from the truck when a grenade burst in front of her shattering both her legs and spewing splinters into her chest and hands.

Musa meanwhile blames it on fate. "Usually I go to the meetings while my sister-in-law is busy trading in clothes," Musa continues. Motia Chowdhury, Musa's leader and the AL presidium member, however, directly faults the government. "Khaleda Zia does not want us to express our views and opinions in a democratic way." "If any of the grenades had burst on the truck then the entire Awami League leadership would have been annihilated. It would have been quite easy for Khaleda Zia to rehabilitate the self-confessed killers of Bangabandhu," an angry Motia continues.

The attempt on the life of the leader of the opposition has been perpetrated with government protection, Motia believes. "Usually our workers stay on different rooftops of the nearby buildings along with the police. Because we have always suspected that the government might plant bombs to carry out its own blueprint," Motia says. "But surprisingly," she continues, "our party activists were not allowed to stay guard on the rooftops of nearby buildings. So it is clear that this incident is part of a government sponsored plan to give a new lease on life to the self-confessed killers of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib."

"This is a damning indictment," says Brig Gen Shahedul Anam Khan, a national security analyst. "The grenade has to be primed; so it can either be primed in situ or it can be pre-primed and brought to the site. How is it possible that the police didn't see anyone lobbing grenades from the rooftops while they were guarding the places themselves?" he asks.

Strangely, only a day after the grenade attack on the AL rally, two more grenades were removed from the campus of Central Jail in Bakshibazar and from a toilet in Gulistan Hawker's Market. Army bomb experts later took away the grenades. Inspector General of Prisons said that the grenade could have been thrown in from outside the jail or had been smuggled in due to security lapses. The Dhaka Central Jail is currently holding the under trial accused in the Bangabandhu Murder and Jail Killing case. The verdict in the Jail Killing Case is billed for September 7.

Bangladeshis are hardly strangers to bomb blasts. The first one in recent years happened on March 6, 1999 in Jessore; ten people died when a bomb ripped through a cultural programme organised by left-leaning Udichi Shilpi Goshti. Though the AL, then in power, blamed it on the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the police investigation into the incident has not seen any significant progress yet.

Within two years, terror struck at the heart of the capital on March 6, 1999; seven Communist Party members died in simultaneous blasts at Paltan Maidan. Four more such incidents jolted the AL rule that ended in 2001. During the AL's five-year term, six such blasts rocked the country. Interestingly, though the AL government was quick to find the perpetrators under the BNP's shelter, it did nothing to nab those they believed were behind the blasts. "Though the party wasn't sure about the perpetrators, the AL wanted to use the blasts as a tool to win the next general elections," Anam says.

Whatever the party's elections strategy might have been, the AL miserably failed to win its expected number of seats; the BNP, with the help of some religious parties, won a landslide victory in 2001's general elections. The BNP, after coming to power, has been religiously following the path of its predecessors; only the other way around. The party has been denying the presence of religious extremists from the very first blast by describing it a ploy to damage the country's image abroad. "Sometimes, it seems, the BNP has made a policy decision to deny the links of zealots to the blasts," Brig Anam says.

But the government has had to change that stand when 18 members of Jamiatul Islamia, an Islamic organisation with suspected links with international terrorist outfits, were arrested on September 19 last year in Faridpur. Maulana Abdur Rauf, the leader of the group, told the police that about 500 Bangladeshis went to Afghanistan to fight, of them 33 died.

Bangladesh's contribution to Islamic extremism, in fact, dates back to the era of Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. During the early eighties hundreds of Bangladeshis went to the country to fight what they considered the communist invasion of an Islamic country.

According to Brig Gen Anam, the use of grenade requires expertise and training. "The people who have done it have access to sophisticated arms and ammunition," explains Anam. "The equipment used, the target they have chosen and the way they have used them point to their proficiency in handling highly sophisticated weapons," explains the national security analyst. Such training, moreover, says Anam, could only be given by groups who have been trained outside the country.

"These types of grenades are known as 'Argess hand grenades'. An Austrian company named 'Armaturen Gesellschaf mbh' produces it. This type of grenade is NATO qualified and is used in both conventional and urban warfare."

Anam adds that several South Asian armed groups like United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) are now using anti-personnel grenades in their war with the Indian and Sri Lankan governments. But, he thinks, both the ULFA and LTTE do not have any strategic interest in Bangladesh's internal politics; which narrows down the suspects further.

In fact, the relationship between different local religious extremist groups and international terror networks is much older than many believe. Jane's Intelligence Review (JIR) in its May 2002 issue says, "Osama bin Laden's February 23, 1998, fatwa urging Jihad against the US was co-signed by two Egyptian clerics, an unidentified Pakistani and one named Fazlur Rahman, leader of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh (JMB)." The JMB is an umbrella organisation for several Bangladeshi extremist groups, of which Harkat ul Jihad Islami Bangladesh (HUJIB) is considered the biggest and most important.

HUJIB hit the headlines of international dailies when the group was charged with planting two bombs at a meeting that was to be attended by the then prime minister Sheikh Hasina. "The mission of HUJIB is to establish Islamic rule in Bangladesh. It has an estimated cadre strength of more than several thousand members, and it operates and trains in at least six camps (in Bangladesh)," says the US State Department, which has already put it on its list of terrorist organisations.

Little is known about the HUJIB and its elusive commander Shauqat Osman, who is also known as Sheikh Farid. "Originally the HUJIB consisted of Bangladeshis who had fought as volunteers in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan," the JIR report concludes.

In July this year when she was attending the D-8 conference in Istanbul, Hasina got threatening calls from someone who first claimed to be Kala Jahangir, one of Dhaka's most notorious listed killers. The caller, according to Hasina, threatened to kill her and asked her to leave the hotel she was staying at.

At that time Hasina implicitly accused the government for the threats saying that it was "those who rewarded Bangabandhu's killers and gave them jobs in the foreign ministry and celebrated a birthday on a national mourning day" who were behind the plot to kill her. Khaleda Zia's reaction was equally predictable. She reiterated the standard statement "we will investigate the matter" as with the current grenade attack but had added that the security measures provided by the government to Hasina were far more than what she (Hasina) deserved.

Brig Gen Shahedul Anam finds Hasina's theory quite plausible. "But one thing is for sure -- the perpetrators wanted to divest the Awami League of their leadership. They wanted to incite a civil war like situation," says Anam. The government remains an apathetic observer while law and order is deteriorating sharply, Anam says.

The reaction of the government to 21 August's mayhem has been starkly insensitive. The day the blasts occurred, while all the private channels gave extensive reports on the attack along with detailed footage of the carnage and its aftermath, the state-run BTV gave only about 30 seconds on the incident. Even then, all that BTV news reported was that the Prime Minister had expressed her shock at the afternoon's incident. Radio Bangladesh too had little more to say except that Khaleda Zia and BNP's Secretary General Abdul Mannan Bhuiyan had expressed their shock and assured that the incident would be properly investigated. No details of one of the worst terrorist attacks of this year were given.

Not surprisingly, the blasts have left the entire city in a state of panic and uncertainty. The last bomb attack in Dhaka had been in 2001 when bombs went off at a Pahela Baishakh function in Ramna Park killing ten people. Recently Dhaka's citizens have been watching the aftermath of bomb blasts ripping through other cities and killing residents of towns far away from the capital. But they can no longer be removed from the violence. With no real evidence of who are behind these attacks and the real reasons for such cold-blooded murders, Bangladeshis all over the country can only be on tenterhooks for the next attack. For us, this time, the horror could not have come any closer to home.

Voices of the Injured
Lying on the floor in Ward 32, DMCH is 19 year old Suman from Shiddirganj, who hasn't woken up since the afternoon of August 21. When the grenades started going off, Suman was standing near the truck from where Hasina had just finished her speech. Splinters hit Suman on the head and he immediately fell unconscious. Suman, the son of an AL worker who was killed in a fight a few years ago, had told his mother that he was going to Dhaka to attend to matters related to his electronics shop located in front of the Al's Bangabhaban office. "If I had known he was going to a political meeting I would have stopped him. Which mother would allow her child to go to such things?" says Fatema Begum , Suman's mother while fanning her unconscious child with a hand fan.

Twenty-two year old Shamim who works in a chemical company was on his way to Islampur when he passed by the meeting and decided to stay and listen to Sheikh Hasina's speech. "I am not with any party," says Shamim who keeps cringing in pain.

He was hit by grenade splinters that tore off his flesh in various parts. " I knew it was a bomb as soon as I heard the loud bang. I tried to run. Then something hit me. I fell down. All around me I could see bodies. Then someone carried me to an ambulance and brought the here," he says.

Abdul Bepari, a middle aged trader from Nabanganj keeps growling in pain. His right ribcage is bandaged and he is being given blood. Apparently a bullet hit him just after the grenades went off. Bepari a long-time AL party member was right in front of the truck, the apparent target of the attack. Bepari was also hit in the hand by splinters from an exploding grenade.

Rashed 22, an AL party worker cannot move his right leg, which is almost completely bandaged. He is still bleeding from the splinter wounds in his upper thigh and lower leg. When the splinters hit me my leg went loose I could not walk but somehow I dragged myself on to the road" says Rashed who works in a sweater factory in Azimpur.

Copyright (R) thedailystar.net 2004