Propagating radicalism, circulating anti-liberation narratives, and slaying rivals are the cornerstone of Islami Chhatra Shibir's politics, leading to bans on many campuses, alleged former student leaders who became victims of Shibir's gruesome attacks.
Shibir, the student wing of Jamaat-e-Islami, continued the crimes due to the absence of proper documentation of those incidents of severing, the tendons of many university students with sharp weapons, revealed the survivors participating in a webinar held recently, reports UNB.
Regarding the reason behind their attacks, the victims said Shibir activists were infuriated by initiatives they had undertaken to expose the 'radical, hardline, and extremist' views of the group, that was rejected by general students.
As most such attacks were carried out during the last BNP-Jamaat tenure (2001-2006), lack of cheap Internet and absence of CCTV footage conspired with that dreaded outfit, they added.
Rajshahi University (RU) campus witnessed horrific attacks by Shibir cadres who cut tendons of Bangladesh Chhatra League students.
Dr Shah Alam, who enrolled in Rajshahi Medical College in 2004, said Shibir leaders and activists became so violent following the BNP-Jamaat takeover in 2001 that they didn't even allow Chhatra League students to stay in their dormitories or take exams.
Recalling the killing of another RU student Farque whose body was recovered from a manhole after Shibir cadres cut his tendons, Dr Alam said, “This happened even after Awami League returned to power back in 2009.”
Dipak Pal, another former BCL leader of the Mymensingh Agricultural University unit, said, "In 2001, when I was a second-year student, a gang kept stabbing me until they thought that I went beyond all the pain.”
“However, later, I was taken to Rajshahi Medical and underwent intensive treatment. Though I recovered, my body bears such marks.”
They swooped on him after he rushed to a polling center where they snatched ballot boxes and kept stuffing ballots sealing with BNP-Jamaat's electoral symbol during the 2001 election, he added.
Tonmoy Ahmed, former general secretary of Awami League's Buet unit, referring to a report by a newspaper, said, “A fake story was cooked up to criminalize me and my junior Arif Raihan Dwip that we beat an imam at a mosque on the campus. The reason they targeted us was that both of us were active in the youths' movement against the war criminals.”
Days into the news getting published, Dwip was hacked to death by another BUET student.
The attacker, now on bail, confessed that provocative sermons by one Imam influenced him to carry out the killing, Tonmoy added.
Shibir, known as Islami Chhatra Sangha before Bangladesh's independence, actively helped Pakistani occupation forces in 1971 to commit genocide and other war crimes, the speakers added.
