On the morning of August 6, during her frantic search for her adolescent son Sabur, missing since previous noon, Rahen Jannat Ferdousi encountered a rickshaw-van piled with several burnt bodies near Ashulia police station in Savar.
The mother paid little attention to the van, as it was not even in the farthest corner of her mind that her child could be among them. But by that afternoon, Sabur’s burnt body was found in the pile.
‘We had never imagined he could be dead,’ Rahen said on December 19.
Sabur, a 10th grader of Shaheen School in Ashulia, joined the ‘Long march to Dhaka,’ a protest calling for the ouster of the Awami League regime, just hours before Sheikh Hasina resigned as prime minister and fled to India on August 5.
The 14-year-old boy, however, was not involved in the protests demanding quota reform in government jobs that began on July 1, said her mother. Sabur only joined the long march on August 5, lying to his mother that he was off to coaching in the morning.
Sabur called his elder brother from Baipail in Savar at around 12:30pm to inform him that he had joined the protest and ‘people were dying in front of him from gunfire.’
Between 3:00pm and 3:20pm, Sabur called next-door neighbour, Jihad, twice—first crying and saying he was afraid as many people were dying, and then to tell him that he took shelter in a house near the Baipail over bridge.
‘The police shot him at about 4:00pm and burned in the evening along with several others,’ the mother said, weeping.
The family eventually became confirmed about Sabur’s death from a Jahangirnagar University student who was involved in the recovery of the piled up bodies from the rickshaw van on August 6 after the fall of Hasina regime.
Grim video footage of bodies being piled onto a rickshaw van in Ashulia went viral in the last week of August, showing the police in complete nonchalance loading one body onto another.
Later it was found that Sabur’s body was among them.
Sabur, who had never placed second in any class except once and aspired to be a maths teacher, was a calm-natured boy.
Having lost the younger one of their only two sons, Rahen and her garment worker husband moved back to their hometown, Mohadebpur in Naogaon, where Sabur was laid to rest on August 7.
The listing of those martyred in the July-August mass uprising still continues by the Directorate General of Health Services.
Chief adviser Muhammad Yunus on November 17 said that around 1,500 people were killed and 19,931 others were injured during the uprising.
source: new age