Detectives today claimed that journalist Shafik Rehman admitted that he had held several meetings with those suspected to be involved in a plot to abduct and kill Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s son Sajeeb Wazed Joy. Monirul Islam, additional commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police said this, after seizing some documents from Rehman’s house at Estakon in Dhaka. Asked about Amar Desh acting editor Mahmudur Rahman’s involvement in the incident, the police officer said detectives were looking…
Posts published in “Bangladesh”
China’s Great Firewall isn’t a barrier to trade – it’s only a bulwark against Western propaganda, a Chinese state-run newspaper wants to remind citizens. The Global Times came to the defense of the country’s Internet censors on Monday as they face renewed criticism from the United States. “History will positively assess the key role of the (Great Firewall) system,” said the paper in an editorial that ran in both Chinese and English. The U.S. Trade…
Dhaka: The BNP yesterday announced the names of seven joint secretaries general and eight organising secretaries, including two women, of its new national executive committee. Mujibur Rahman Sarwar, Syed Moazzem Hossain Alal, Khairul Kabir Khokon, Habib-un-Nabi Khan Sohel, Harun-ar-Rashid and Aslam Chowdhury have become new joint secretaries general. The other one, Mahbub Uddin Khokon, held the same post in the previous committee. Shahadat Hossain (Chittagong), Nazrul Islam Monju (Khulna), Ruhul Quddus Talukder Dulu (Rajshahi), Bilkis…
Dhaka: Militant group Ansar al-Islam claimed responsibility for the murder of secular online activist Nazim Uddin Samad, according to SITE Intelligence Group. US-based SITE Intelligence Group yesterday in a statement posted online said, “Ansar al-Islam, the Bangladesh division of al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), claimed credit for the murder of blogger Nazim Uddin Samad in the capital, Dhaka.” The Daily Star could not independently verify the claim. Meanwhile, the authorities are trying to find…
The writer is an investigative journalist based in Bangladesh. DHAKA, Bangladesh — In 1971, Bengali nationalists and the people of what was then called East Pakistan waged a war of independence against the Pakistani Army. The conflict culminated in the birth of a new nation, Bangladesh. The war, which lasted nine months, was a brutal one: Depending on the source, some 300,000 to three million people were killed, and millions were displaced. There is no…
Bogra: Police yesterday recovered 20 grenades, firearms and ammunition, and a huge amount of bomb-making materials, including gel explosives, from a house in Sherpur upazila of Bogra where two people were killed in a bomb explosion Sunday night. Law enforcers suspect that the house was a militants’ den. A 12-member bomb disposal team of the Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime unit led by Senior Assistant Commissioner Hayatuddowlla Chowdhury conducted a drive there and recovered four…
Politics in Bangladesh never fails to amuse us. No vaudeville play writer could have scripted the saga of Fakhrul Islam Alamgir as well as we have seen the events played out in his life in the last six or so years since he was made the ‘acting secretary general’ of the BNP. It must have come as a great relief to the gentleman to have been anointed as the substantive party secretary general of the…
Dhaka: Jamaat-e-Islami has called for a dawn-to-dusk countrywide hartal (shutdown) tomorrow over the Supreme Court ruling that upheld death penalty for its leader Mir Quasem Ali in a war crimes case. The announcement was advertised on Jamaat-e-Islami’s website after the Supreme Court order on the condemned war crminal’s appeal against death penalty awarded to him by the trial court. The apex court, while upholding death in one charge, acquitted the war criminal in three other…
The writer is professor of International Relations, University of Karachi and has authored a study titled Bangladesh and Pakistan: From Conflict to Cooperation. BANGLADESH is again plunging itself into another phase of political turmoil and violence. The decision by the Dhaka-based International Criminal Tribunal (ICT) to award capital punishment to two key leaders of the Bangladeshi Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) on charges of war crimes during the March-December 1971 civil war in the former East Pakistan has…
Report in Daily Star, Jan 20 Dhaka; Eminent journalist and cultural activist Kamal Lohani yesterday demanded that BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia be declared a “war criminal” and sought her trial for her role “against” the ongoing war crimes trial. “It is normal for a lady who was with the Pakistani army (in 1971) for nine months to speak against the war crimes trial,” said the adviser of Ekatturer Ghatak Dalal Nirmul Committee. “Why should we…
Op-ed by Mozammel H. Khan in Daily Star, Dhaka, Feb 18 (The writer is the Convenor of the Canadian Committee for Human Rights and Democracy in Bangladesh). Politicians in every democratic society claim to represent the wishes of the people. It is the wishes of the people that become the prime movers of the successful political parties and the leaders who lead them. “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and…