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Playing with fire

1 January 2006, 18:00 PM
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
By Suman Debnath Sutrapur, Dhaka
1 January 2006, 18:00 PM
The Netrokona massacre occurred on December 8, 2005, one day before its liberation in 1971 and it has been termed by the State Minister for Home Affairs as a new dimension. The minister within an hour claimed the identity of the bomber as a Hindu, namely Yadav Biswas. The family of Yadav straightway denied his involvement in such a heinous crime and said that he was a simple spectator. The injury mark on Yadav's body does not suggest that he carried the bomb. The witness could not confirm that the two bombers carried out the attack and Yadav was one of them. On the other hand, witnesses confirmed that they saw one bomber on a bicycle. Rezaul Hossain Suman, a witness undergoing treatment at Mymensingh Medical College Hospital stated," I was standing just a couple of feet away from the cyclist and saw him approaching the crowd. As he was trying to reach the crowd, a policeman asked him where he was heading for," the eyewitness described. The cyclist then went back several feet, pulled something from the bag he was carrying and the bomb exploded. This was published in newspapers and ATN, NTV telecast the same on the night of 8 December.

Besides witnesses, local people told reporters that they knew Yadav, a motor mechanic and his behaviour never seemed to be suspicious. This was perhaps the first time a locally known person was found to be a bomber as identified by the Home Ministry.

It is very surprising that the minister very quickly concluded that Yadav was a JMB man and claimed that a Hindu bomber in JMB was a new dimension. At the same time, a bureaucrat quickly echoed his minister and stated that the suicide bomber named Yadav conducted the bomb attack at Netrokona. In fact, this is a new strategy of the Home Ministry to divert the public attention towards a different destination.

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The government should know that they are playing with fire by encouraging communalism and hatred in the country. In 2001, immediately after their win in the election, BNP people killed, looted the houses of Hindus throughout the country specially in Barisal, Bagerhat and Khulna.

Fanning communal feeling in this soil is an old technique followed by Pakistanis, but it proved useless and rather acted as a boomerang. They are in fact playing with fire without understanding its consequences. We request the politicians to refrain from adopting such heinous tricks for the sake of 140 millions people's welfare and national development.

Nobody has the right to jeopardise the national independence and destroy the values of our hard earned democracy.