No one says whose gunshots killed five ordinary people in Hajiganj
After a brief shower, it was a usual autumn evening and the town looked calm to Bablu, a construction worker from Chapainawabganj, except for the sounds of distant agitating crowds simmering in protests after the evening prayers.
Bablu ignored the noise, and grabbed his mobile phone to check on his family who were more than 400 kilometres away from his workplace at the under-construction building.
But the tensions did not subside; it rather turned violent suddenly as police tried to disperse the agitating mob.
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The 35-year-old construction worker sprinted to the west-side window of his room on the seventh floor of the building as police whistles, shouting, chase, and counter-chase shattered the silence. There had been gunshots at around 8:30pm.
As Bablu had been watching the agitation at least 200 metres away from the building, a stray bullet suddenly pierced his forehead. After bleeding profusely, he died.
"We could not take him to the hospital immediately because of the fierce clash outside," said the slain worker's cousin Mosharraf, who was with Bablu on the floor on the night of 13 October.
Mosharraf said when Bablu was taken to hospital, as the situation normalised, doctors pronounced him dead.
After losing their colleague, Mosharraf and 16-17 other grieving workers, who had been working at the 12-storey commercial Business Park Trade Centre, left Chandpur's Hajiganj for their hometown Chapainawabganj on Sunday.
"What is my brother's crime? He did not even go to the demonstration – he was only watching it from the seventh floor. Why would the stray bullet kill him up here?" Mosharraf asked while talking to The Business Standard.
"My children became traumatised after seeing the bullet-struck body of their father," Bablu's wife Baby Ara Khatun said on Tuesday. After losing the lone breadwinner of the family, she is now only concerned about the future – not about justice for the killing of the husband.
"What does justice mean to the poor? They do not have the money to seek justice! It is for the rich," Baby Khatun said.
Similar to this case, other four individuals who died in gunfire that night are just common people who were not in the protest against the reported desecration of the Quran in Cumilla.
Take another victim, Mohammad Shamim Hossain, 28, – a banana vendor – who had been returning home after the day's sales.
"We started a search as Shamim did not return home even at 3:30am," Shamim's brother Arif told TBS.
Quoting witnesses, the brother said Shamim had been coming to Hajiganj road from College Street with his pushcart. At one point, he got caught in the shooting.
Arif said the family is on the verge of starvation and no one had reached out to them in the past couple of days. "Will justice bring any food for us?" Arif asked.
The shooting on that night also claimed the lives of two students – Yasin Hossain Hridoy, 14, and Al Amin, 18. The fifth victim, Sagor Mia, 25, used to drive a pick-up van to make ends meet. An injured Sagor was transferred to Dhaka Medical College Hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries.
Families seek answers to the same question
"With bullet injuries, my grandson repeatedly asked for water. But no one gave him anything to drink," Hridoy's grandmother Fazar Banu said.
She said if the police had beaten Hridoy severely and made him crippled, even then he would have been alive today. "Why did they open fire?" asked the grief-stricken grandmother.
Al Amin's mother Sahera Begum also has the same question. She said Al Amin went out of the home to have his assignment notes printed. "My son told me that he would study with his sister at night. But he returned home dead," Sahera said, breaking down in tears.
One of the banana-seller Shamim's customers, Mohammad Hossain Bepari, asked why Shamim, who used to make ends meet by selling bananas, had to die in the police firing.
"Shamim had never been in protests. He would not even talk about religion," said Mohammad Hossain.
'Cops lost nerve and opened fire'
On condition of anonymity, a top official in Hajiganj upazila told TBS that the police had lost their nerve as protests broke out in the town after the evening prayers.
"They [police] opted for the extreme measure of firing at the mob at the very beginning as there had been daylong police-mob clashes in Cumilla on 13 October," the official said.
In an observation, human rights organisation Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK) also echoed the claim of the official, saying, "Police did not use any other riot-controlling measures before making the decision to open fire."
AKM Shahidul Haque, a former inspector general of police, told TBS that there are several steps to control any riot.
"First, the police will use water cannons. If that fails, they will lob tear shell canisters. Rubber bullets will be fired if tear shells cannot disperse the crowd. Then, there will be repeated requests through loudhailers for the mob to move away. The last step will be gunfire with warnings if the situation really slips out of hand," he noted.
"If these steps have not been maintained in Hajiganj, a departmental probe should be commissioned. If Ain o Salish Kendra's observations are true, it is really disappointing and unacceptable," added the ex-police chief.
We didn't open fire at the innocent: Police
Sohel Mahmud, additional superintendent of police (Chandpur Hajiganj Circle), told TBS that the police had not opened fire at any innocent people on that night. He also claimed that zealots had brought stones by rickshaw-vans to carry out attacks on temples.
"But the death of the construction worker is quite suspicious," said the police official.
An executive probe led by the Chandpur deputy commissioner has been launched and the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of police has already collected evidence from the spot.
"Apart from police firing, there were gunshots on that night that we assume were fired by perpetrators possessing illegal firearms. The CID ballistic report will hopefully clarify everything," said Sohel Mahmud.
He, however, declined to comment on why the police had started firing in the first place without any warning.
In Hajiganj, 54 people have been arrested in ten cases in connection with the temple attacks. Some 2,000 people have been accused in the cases. In addition, a case filed by the police said that the cops fired 109 rounds as they could not disperse the zealots.
