Closure of sorts

The judgment in the August 2004 grenade attack case, in which 19 accused were sentenced to death and 19 to life imprisonment, reveals the dark side of Bangladesh’s politics and leaves many of the survivors unhappy.

Published : Oct 24, 2018 12:30 IST

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

For the party in power to try to gain political advantage by killing opposition leaders is not indicative of democratic thought…. Trying to eliminate leaders of the opposition is not acceptable….”

These were some key observations that Judge Shahed Nuruddin, of the Speedy Trial Tribunal-1, made on October 10 when he delivered the landmark judgment in the case relating to the August 21, 2004, grenade attack in Dhaka in which 24 activists of the then opposition Awami League—including the general secretary of the party’s women’s wing, Ivy Rahman, wife of the late President Zillur Rahman)—were killed and more than 300 people were badly injured. The trial proceedings lasted 1,754 days. On the fateful day, the Awami League had organised an anti-terrorism rally in Dhaka’s Bangabandhu Avenue. As Sheikh Hasina got on to the truck that was being used as a podium to deliver her speech, grenades rained down from surrounding buildings. Sheikh Hasina, then the opposition leader, narrowly escaped death.

“The attack was not just an attack, it was an attempt to eliminate the opposition from politics,” the court observed. The judge linked the deadly attack to the conspiracy that led to the assassinations in 1975 of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s founding father, and four national independence leaders.

The verdict, in which 19 people were sentenced to death and 19 more to life imprisonment, revealed some dark features of the country’s politics. To carry out this attack, those in power grossly misused the state machinery; the powerful spy agencies, the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) and the National Security Intelligence (NSI); and the police to annihilate the opposition leadership. The conviction of once-influential politicians, former top officials of police, national intelligence agencies and militants of the Harkat-ul-Jehad-al-Islami (HuJI) exposed the abuse of state machinery to not only carry out the attack but also mislead the investigators.

The then Prime Minister Khaleda Zia’s State Minister for Home, Lutfozzaman Babar; her Deputy Minister for Education, Abdus Salam Pintu; the then Director of the DGFI, Brig. Gen. Rezzaqul Haider; the then Director General of the NSI, Brig. Gen. (retd) Abdur Rahim; and 15 others were found guilty on charges of killing through common intention, planning and criminal conspiracy. They all got death sentences. They were also handed the death penalty in the charges brought against them under the Explosive Substances Act.

Tarique Rahman, 34, Khaleda Zia’s eldest son; Abul Harris Chowdhury, her political secretary; Kazi Mofazzal Hossain Kaikobad, a lawmaker of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP); and 16 others were given life terms for both sets of charges. Also, in the explosives case, Tarique Rahman, Babar and 36 other accused were found guilty of injuring victims grievously through common intention, planning and criminal conspiracy.

The former Inspectors General of Police (IGP) Ashraful Huda and Shahudul Haque were sentenced to two years in jail and fined 50,000 takas for harbouring the offenders. The court handed down another two years to the two former top policemen for protecting the offenders. Lt Commander (retd) Saiful Islam Duke, a nephew of Khaleda Zia; Saiful Islam Joarder, a former DGFI official (sacked); and Maj. Gen. (retd) A.T.M. Amin, a former top DGFI official; were also given four years in jail on two counts, two years for each, for harbouring and protecting the offenders.

Another former IGP, Khoda Baksh; a Superintendent of Police of the Criminal Investigation Department, Ruhul Amin; and CID Assistant Superintendents of Police Abdur Rashid and Munshi Atikur Rahman were found guilty of misleading the investigation and cooking up the “Joj Mia” story. (A day after the attack, the police filed a case against unnamed people. Senior CID officials later implicated a man referred to as “Joj Mia” in the case and detained him along with 20 petty criminals. However, the media later revealed the actual identities of the detainees, and the ludicrous nature of the investigation was exposed by the end of 2004.) They were given a two-year sentence for this and a three-year sentence for failing to investigate the attack properly.

According to testimony presented in court, the grenades used in the attack were supplied by Abdus Salam Pintu’s brother Maulana Tajuddin, a fugitive militant leader who had in turn procured them from Abu Yusuf Butt alias Abdul Majed Butt, a leader of the Pakistan-based militant outfit Hizbul Mujahideen. In a confessional statement before the court, Majed, who was sentenced to death, said the grenades came to Bangladesh by ship from Pakistan. He also said that they used to bring grenades and bullets from Pakistan to Bangladesh and then send them to India.

The convicts were given a month to appeal.

The prime target of the attack was Sheikh Hasina. But she survived with injuries to her ear. Some of her party leaders protected her by forming a human shield around her.

Tarique Rahman’s role

The witnesses for the prosecution, despite getting medical treatment at home and abroad, still have splinter injuries from the deadly attack. The court said only “exemplary punishment” could prevent the repetition of such a barbaric attack. However, the BNP, which is now aligning with other anti-government political parties in a desperate effort to challenge the ruling Awami League in the forthcoming parliamentary election, rejected the verdicts as “politically motivated”.

The latest conviction of Tarique Rahman, now the acting chairman of the BNP, is likely to be a heavy blow to the party as it comes just a few months before the national election.

Quoting the testimonies of various prosecution witnesses, including Abdur Rashid, who was a vice president of the Saudi-based charity Al-Markazul Islami, the court said that the accused HuJI leaders Sheikh Farid, Mufti Hannan, Abu Taher and Maulana Tajuddin were taken to Hawa Bhaban, Tarique Rahman’s office, in Dhaka’s Banani residential area, in mid August of 2004. There they met Tarique Rahman, Harris Chowdhury, Babar, the Jamaat-e-Islami leader Ali Ahsan Muhammad Mojaheed, and top DGFI and NSI officials. Tarique Rahman and Babar assured the HuJI leaders of all sorts of support to carry out the attack, the investigators of the grenade attack revealed.

Tarique Rahman was nowhere to be seen until 2001 when the country was heading for an election. With a promise of getting a leadership role, he set up his office in Hawa Bhaban. It was Tarique Rahman who oversaw the formation of a coalition between BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami, the party that had violently opposed Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan.

The results of the 2001 election were overwhelmingly in favour of the BNP and the Jamaat coalition. Tarique Rahman soon turned Hawa Bhaban into an alternative centre of power, dictating state affairs and becoming known for corruption, the reckless abuse of power, and terrorism. Allegations ran rife that he was involved in extortion and bribe-taking, and much later when a military-run caretaker government dislodged the BNP from power, he faced at least 23 cases of corruption, money laundering and misuse of power.

He was convicted to seven years in jail and Tk.20 crore in fines in a money laundering case in 2016. The United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated this particular case, and for the first time in the history of Bangladesh, an FBI special agent testified in a Dhaka court. Tarique Rahman was sentenced to 10 years and his mother to five years in the Khaleda Zia orphanage graft case in February this year. He built up an empire based on wealth, greed, corruption and raw muscle power. He also decided to patronise militants to counter the Awami League. The militant group Jagrata Muslim Bangladesh started operating in the country, openly lynching people in the name of religion and unleashing a reign of terror. The HuJI surfaced at this time.

Many survivors and family members of those killed said they were not satisfied with the verdict as Tarique Rahman was not given the highest punishment, though he was the mastermind. Law Minister Anisul Huq said the government would seek “greater punishment” for him.

“I waited for this verdict for 14 years. But I am not fully satisfied because Tarique has not been given the death penalty,” said Mahbuba Parvin, who suffered life-changing injuries in the attack. She was the women’s affairs secretary of the Dhaka City Swechchhasebak League, a front organisation of the Awami League, and was photographed after the attack lying among the corpses in a blood-stained gold-coloured silk sari with a black handbag on her bosom. Her body was riddled with splinters. “The main planner Tarique was supposed to get a death sentence. As an injured survivor, I am aggrieved,” said Nazib Ahmed, a cousin of Sheikh Hasina’s, who was among those who created a human shield to save her. Rashida Akhter Ruma, another survivor with over 700 splinters in her body, asked: “How come Tarique gets a life term when Babar, who worked at the behest of Tarique, gets the death sentence?”

Repeated attacks

There were repeated attacks on Sheikh Hasina’s life, but she survived miraculously on each occasion. She and her younger sister Sheikh Rehena were not in the country when the August 15, 1975, massacre, in which her father was killed, took place. The first major attempt on her life was on July 20, 2000, when two powerful bombs were planted at a meeting place she was to visit and at a helipad in western Kotalipara. But police found the bombs before they exploded. Another attempt was made on September 25, 2001, in Sylhet, but that too was frustrated. On May 30, 2001, militants planned to kill her in Khulna. On January 24, 1988, police opened fire indiscriminately at an Awami League meeting in Chittagong at which Sheikh Hasina was present, killing 24 partymen. Besides, cadres of the Freedom party, which was involved in the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, launched a desperate attempt to kill her on the night of August 11, 1989, by firing at her residence in Dhanmandi.

The grenade attack of August 21, 2004, is one of the most shocking political crimes in the country’s history after the assassination of Mujibur Rahman. It is another black letter day in the nation’s politics and has had a deep impact on politics and widened the political divide in the country.

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