Buet student hacked by fellow dies

2 July 2013, 18:28 PM

UPDATED 3 July 2013, 01:59 AM

Subir Das and Protik Chakroborty

Arif Rayhan Dwip Buet student Dwip succumbed to his injuries at a hospital in the capital in the early hours of yesterday, and his 84-day-long battle for life thus came to an end. Arif Rayhan Dwip, 23, a third year student of Mechanical Engineering Department of the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (Buet), was hacked on the university campus on April 9. Since then, critically injured Dwip had been undergoing treatment at the city's Square Hospital, where he died at the Intensive Care Unit around 3:30am yesterday. His body was taken to the Buet campus for namaj-e-janaza around 10:00am, and later shifted to his Nazirpur village in Pirojpur district, where he was laid to rest, said Delwar Hossain, director of the Directorate of Students' Welfare (DSW) of the Buet. Buet authorities had donated over Tk 21 lakh for Dwip's treatment, Delwar added. On April 18, the Detective Branch (DB) of police arrested Md Mezbah Uddin, a fourth year student of Civil Engineering Department of the Buet, from the campus. Mezbah admitted to have carried out the attack on Dwip at the university's Nazrul Islam Hall. The DB would soon frame charges of murder against Mezbah, said DB Inspector Jasim Uddin Dewan. He added that they could not frame charges against Mezbah all these days as they had been waiting for the statement of Dwip. Meanwhile, Gonojagoron Mancha -- a platform set up on February 5 to demand the death penalty for all war criminals of the 1971 Liberation War -- brought out a protest rally from the Projonmo Chattar (Shahbagh intersection) to the Buet campus yesterday evening, demanding exemplary punishment for the killers of Dwip. Dwip, member of the Buet unit of the Bangladesh Chhatra League convening committee, beat up the imam of a Buet mosque for supplying food to the April 5 Hefajat-e Islam grand rally, the DB investigators quoted Mezbah as saying during the interrogation. Quoting Mezbah, DB (South) Additional Deputy Commissioner Sanwar Hossain, told The Daily Star that the sermons of a Khatib of a mosque at the capital's Demra had inspired him to punish those speaking ills against Islam. A number of Mezbah's classmates and a teacher, on condition of anonymity, said Mezbah used to be a sincere student, but he gradually started losing interest in his studies. He used to distribute pro-Islamic books among the students, they said, adding that he had also dropped a semester.