Bangladesh News

Four Dhaka University (DU) teachers were released from prison last evening following a presidential mercy after three of them had been convicted by a court in the morning in the second case of emergency power rules (EPR) violation against them in connection with last August’s campus unrest.

Prof Sadrul Amin, Prof Anwar Hossain and Prof Harun-or Rashid, each of whom had been sentenced to two years imprisonment, were freed along with Prof Nimchandra Bhowmik, who had been acquitted in the same case.

Coming out of Dhaka Central Jail, the freed teachers last evening at a rally at Central Shaheed Minar in the capital, vowed to continue the ‘DU legacy of standing up against all sorts of injustice for the sake of the country and the people’.

Detained student Moniruzzaman Sardar, who had also been acquitted in both cases, was however not released till filing of this report last night as prison officials claimed they had not received any official order yet for his release.

Immediately after Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Golam Rabbani in two minutes pronounced the verdict, sentencing the three teachers and acquitting the other teacher along with 15 DU students, the government on its own initiated the process for presidential mercy for the convicted.

As the verdict triggered severe protest on DU campus again, the military backed administration completed the process within a few hours to ensure the release of the detained teachers who the day before had been acquitted of the same charges in another case.

President Iajuddin Ahmed earlier in the day approved the clemency, clearing the way for the jail authorities to release the teachers.

The teachers at first however had refused to leave the jail without their detained students, but later they agreed to come out of the jail on assurance that their students will also be released soon.

At the jail gate, hundreds of colleagues, students, admirers and relatives received the freed teachers, who had been detained for months on charges of violating EPR by instigating violent student protests against the caretaker government.

DU Teachers’ Association (Duta) General Secretary Prof Anwar, and Social Science Faculty Dean Rashid were detained by the army-led joint forces at the early hour of August 24, while Duta Chief Prof Sadrul and Physics Department Chairman Bhowmik surrendered to the court on September 16 and September 18 respectively, following the court’s arrest warrant against them.

Defence counsels yesterday said the sentencing of the three teachers had been based on very poor evidence, and the previous day’s verdict in a similar case had also been based on shoddy evidence.

Most of the witnesses in both cases refrained from implicating the accused teachers and students in violating EPR during the campus unrest.

Legal experts said both judgements suffer from a lack of strict scrutiny of witness depositions, raising questions about the caretaker government’s neutrality in enforcing EPR.

The court on Monday acquitted all four teachers and 11 students while sentencing four other students to two years imprisonment in connection with the same charges in another case.

The jurists also questioned the verdict that had sentenced four Rajshahi University (RU) teachers to imprisonment in last December for violating EPR by brining out a silent procession. On December 12, in another case of torching a Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) vehicle, 10 students and an employee of RU were also sentenced to imprisonment.

With yesterday’s conviction, a total of seven teachers and 14 students of two universities, were convicted on charges of violating EPR and for torching the DGFI vehicle during last August’s campus unrest. All the convicted individuals were however subsequently freed on presidential mercy, although none of them had petitioned for pardon.

In addition to the presidential pardons, the government also withdrew a number of cases against the teachers and students implicated in the August campus violence, a move seen as a bid to remedy the tension that has been permeating the campuses for months now.

On August 20, a violent student protest broke out on DU campus following a brawl between an army man and a student during a soccer match on the university playground. The protest later spread to other educational institutions in the city and elsewhere across the country, continuing for a few days resulting in an imposition of a curfew and shutting down of all educational institutions in all major cities.

Following the imposition of the curfew, the military backed administration launched a crackdown on teachers and students, detaining some of them and filing cases against the spotlighted teachers and students of DU and RU.

In the drive, three teachers of RU were detained by the joint forces while five other teachers surrendered to a court following issuance of arrest warrants against them.

None other than the teachers and students of DU and RU has yet been convicted, although police initially implicated 84,000 unnamed persons in 59 cases filed with different police stations in Dhaka, Rajshahi and other parts of the country.

A government formed one-member judicial probe commission in its report submitted to the chief adviser on November 15, said the three-day student protest was initially spontaneous, but later ‘a vested quarter and some politicians’ added fuel to it.

The commission of Justice Habibur Rahman Khan made a 28-point recommendation for ensuring congenial atmosphere in educational institutions, requesting the chief adviser to make the report public. But the report has not yet been made public in over two months.

The military backed administration also has yet to take any step to ensure trial of the killers of a rickshaw puller who was shot dead during the violence on RU campus.

The local police station on October 22 submitted the final report on the killing of rickshaw puller Afzal Hossain saying they could not identify the killers.