A group of academics, families of victims of the genocide orchestrated by the Pakistan army, rights activists, researchers and students held Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) founder General Ziaur Rahman and his successor Begum Khaleda Zia responsible for the rise of Jamaat-e-Islami — which strongly opposed the independence of Bangladesh and with the Pakistan army committed crimes against humanity during the Liberation War — after the country’s independence, reports UNB.
Following the brutal assassination of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, along with most of his family members, Gen Ziaur Rahman became the country’s first military ruler who, the speakers said, offered an olive branch to the then isolated war criminal led party Jamaat, creating a nexus with BNP.
“It was Zia who embraced the killer of my father Dr Alim Chowdhury, then an prominent ophthalmologist, who was dragged away from his home and gunned down by local collaborators aided by the Pakistan army during the Liberation War in 1971,” said Dr Nuzhat Chowdhury at a recent seminar.
“We believe a known collaborator of the Pakistan army, Maulana Abdul Mannan, was the mastermind behind the killing of my father. Their justification was my father offered treatment to wounded freedom fighters. Such killers of freedom fighters were embraced by Zia,” Dr Nuzhat, a renowned ophthalmologist like her father, said.
Bd-pratidin English/Tanvir Raihan
