BCL goons vandalise principal's residence
BCL goons vandalise principal's residence
Also his car, being miffed by refusal to be extorted by them
A few sofa cushions and uprooted garden plants litter the driveway. On the first floor of the two-storey building, one room shows a tumbled refrigerator and some utensils strewn on the floor. That was the scene at the official residence of the principal of Sylhet Polytechnic Institute in the city after the goons of Bangladesh Chhatra League ran an hour long rampage.
On their way back, they took away the laptop and two cellphones of the principal and vandalised three official microbuses and a motorbike parked on the compound.
Prosanta Kumar Basu, the principal, said it all happened because he refused to pay them Tk 20,000 as extortion money on the occasion of Saraswati Puja on Sunday night.
Police and Rapid Action Battalion (Rab) visited the scene and a contingent of police was deployed on the campus.
Basu said four or five youths stormed his house in Khozarkhola around 11:00am and demanded the amount for "light decorations and organising cultural events", a request he rejected immediately.
"Why should I pay you when the puja was already held?" he told them. "Moreover you are not students anymore. Teachers and current students were involved in organising the celebrations."
At one stage of the quarrel, they used swear words and some hundred other activists waiting outside started hurling bricks at other buildings and some rampaged through his house.
Basu, who was confined to a toilet during the time of rampage, said he heard several gunshots, too.
In a complaint filed with police, he accused Russel, an ex-student, and Akil, Opurbo, Rajib and Rudro, who are still studying, and about hundred other unidentified people.
Officer-in-Charge Khairul Fazal of Dakshin Surma Police Station said the filing of a case was under way.
The principal said most of the attackers were ex-students and outsiders who had been extorting people on and around the campus for a long time. Law enforcers know them, he added.
Saikat Chandra Rimi, president of the Polytechnic Institute unit of BCL, did not respond to phone calls of this correspondent.
However, BCL city unit General Secretary Emrul Hasan, talking to The Daily Star, said the institute leadership faced various allegations, and the unit committee was dissolved now.
The principal's residence came under attack twice last year over similar matters.