At a Saturday rally in 2004, Sheikh Hasina was the key speaker as the Opposition leader. The rally was teeming with people. In the shadows lurked attackers armed with grenades. Ms. Hasina was delivering her speech from a truck used as a makeshift dais. As she was about to wrap up her speech, a series of grenades went off — one after another — on Bangabandhu Avenue in the heart of the capital Dhaka.
The attack left 24 people dead and about 100 injured. Ms. Hasina, the main target of the attack, survived with a partial hearing loss. The day morphed into one of the darkest for the Awami League led by Ms. Hasina, now the Prime Minister of Bangladesh. Played out on a scale never seen before, the carnage still defines the political narrative in Bangladesh.
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In 2004, Ms. Hasina’s arch-rival Khaleda Zia was in power. Fourteen years later, Ms. Zia’s son Tarique Rahman ended up on a long list of convicts for planning and executing the attack.
Mr. Rahman, who now leads the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) from exile in London, was jailed for life. Ms. Zia’s State Minister for Home Affairs at the time, Lutfozzaman Babar, and former Deputy Minister for Education Abdus Salam Pintu were sentenced to death.
A Dhaka court on October 10 convicted a total of 49 people, including BNP leaders, Islamist militants and government officials, for their roles in the carnage. The charges against most of the convicts include a criminal conspiracy to kill Awami League leaders and financing and abetting in the killings by providing explosives.
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Judge Shahed Nuruddin, who presided over the case, said: “It was a disgraceful attempt to make the then opposition party leaderless.” In his verdict, the judge summed up the episode, saying home-grown militants in connivance with their foreign peers, actively helped by the then state machinery, carried out the attack. Judge Nuruddin viewed the attack as part of a broader conspiracy that led to the assassination of independence leader Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1975.
Bickering politics
Judge Nuruddin also shed light on Bangladesh’s bickering politics: “The killings of opposition leaders, orchestrated by the ruling party for political gains, are not an expression of democratic thinking at all. Ordinary people don’t want this political practice. The people will turn away from politics if the killings of innocent people and politicians continue.”
In his reactions, BNP secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir dismissed the verdict as “politically motivated and dictated by the government”.
The BNP announced street protests and black-flag processions, hours after the judge handed down the verdict. On the other hand, Awami League stalwarts have a degree of unhappiness as they think the court was lenient to Mr. Rahman by jailing him for life and not sentencing him to death.
The government will find ways to seek the death penalty for Mr. Rahman, who is believed to have masterminded the attack, Law Minister Anisul Huq said at a media briefing on October 10.
Death penalty for Mr. Rahman, or not, the verdict that came ahead of the parliamentary election due in December will weaken the BNP further. With Ms. Zia serving time in jail in a separate case and her son in exile, the party will find it hard to prevent itself from going into a steep descent.
Arun Devnath is a journalist based in Dhaka, Bangladesh