The attacks preceding Aug 21
In the months before the August 21 grenade blasts about seven years back, the political situation was growing increasingly volatile amid a breakdown of law and order.
At that time, the BNP-led alliance government was lurching from one crisis to another.
At least 12 major attacks led up to the August 21 carnage at an Awami League rally on the capital's Bangabandhu Avenue in 2004.
Most of those assaults using bomb and grenades were against AL, the main opposition party then, and progressive forces championing secular ideals.
An investigator of Criminal Investigation Department (CID) had told this correspondent earlier, Harkatul Jihad al Islami (Huji) used grenades in several attacks before and after the August 21 attack from a cache it was supposed to transport to India-administered Kashmir for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
The LeT high-ups in Pakistan had sent the cache to Bangladesh to despatch it to their men in Kashmir through Satkhira border. But the Huji did not dare to follow the instructions thanks to the Indian authorities' interception of the previous consignment.
The cache of 32 grenades, which the Huji received in Chittagong, rested in Bangladesh for a while before those were used in different major attacks.
The grenades were hurled at AL chief and the then opposition leader Sheikh Hasina on August 21, 2004, the then British high commissioner Anwar Choudhury, AL leaders Suranjit Sengupta, Syeda Jebunnesa Haq, and Badruddin Ahmed Kamran, also mayor of Sylhet, and in the killing of Awami League leader SAMS Kibria in 2005.
The BNP-Jamaat administration was in a tight corner also because of the opposition's call for the incumbents to step down growing louder.
Price spiral of essentials, human rights violations, rampant corruption and politicisation, persecution of journalists and minorities, and rise of militancy made matters even worse.
Against this backdrop, the AL-led opposition's ultimatum for the government to quit by April 30, 2005 clearly put the BNP-Jamaat alliance on edge.
Attacks on Sheikh Hasina and AL men, oppression on opposition leaders and activists including mass arrests, resignation of two BNP lawmakers and their joining Bikalpa Dhara Bangladesh, vigilante campaign by Siddiqul Islam Bangla Bhai's Jagrata Muslim Janata in northern districts, defeat in a legal battle over army deployment in the Dhaka-10 by-election, and a rigged election in the same constituency left the ruling alliance mired deep in controversy.
And then there was Hawa Bhaban, the Banani office from where Tarique Rahman would pull the strings behind the prime minister and her cabinet. AL even announced programmes to lay siege to the controversial office.
Interestingly, the government blamed the main opposition AL for all the ills of the country. Instead of carrying out fair probe into the blasts and killings, it used the law enforcers to incriminate the opposition leaders and workers.
Here is an order of major attacks between January and August 21, 2004:
January 12: Four killed and 37 others injured in a bomb explosion at the shrine of Hazrat Shahjalal in Sylhet
January 15: Journalist Manik Saha bombed to death in Khulna
January 29: Two including an AL leader killed in blasts in Khulna
February 27: Noted writer Humayun Azad critically injured in a machete attack near Bangla Academy in the capital
May 7: AL lawmaker Ahsanullah Master and a schoolboy in Tongi shot dead
May 20: Three bludgeoned to death in Naogaon by Bangla Bhai's men
May 21: British high commissioner Anwar Choudhury hurt in grenade attack at Hazrat Shahjalal Shrine in Sylhet.
June 4: Nine including a two-year-old girl killed in an arson attack on a double-decker near Sheraton hotel, Dhaka
June 21: One killed, AL lawmaker Suranjit Sengupta injured in grenade blast in Sunamganj
June 27: Khulna Press Club President Humayun Kabir Balu killed in a bomb attack
August 5: Simultaneous blasts in front of three cinemas in Sylhet city
August 7: AL leader and Sylhet City Corporation Mayor Badruddin Ahmed Kamran escapes grenade attack, but sees one of his party colleague die.
And, to cap it all, August 21 grenade assault left at least 23 AL leaders including Ivy Rahman killed and scores including Sheikh Hasina injured.

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