430 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড শিরোনাম সূত্র তারিখ ১৭২ বাংলাদেশ মুক্ত ডেইলি মিরর ৯ডিসেম্বর, ১৯৭১ DAILY MIRROR, DECEMBER 9, 1971 LIBERATED! This is a city (Jessore) of which we knew almost nothing eight months ago. It is impoverished and flyblown and. I suppose, of no consequence to anybody save those who have attempted to survive here. Today it was liberated and it might have been Paris in 1944. There is no attempt to exaggerate in this comparison. When, shortly after noon, we arrived at the outskirts of Jessore in a convoy of army trucks, jeeps and rickshaws, the first foreigners to enter the city since the Pakistan army began its occupation in March, we were confronted by a spectacle none of us had expected. The main street, the city square, every doorway and window, were filled with people cheering and saluting and singing hymns, Assault The night before last the Indian army began its direct assault on Jessore, the last important town of Bangladesh, to fall before Dacca the capital. Jessore was the Pakistan army's Maginot line: a network of bunkers and was, we had written, to be one of Asia's greatest sieges. And yet they ran away. Jessore yesterday was the headquarters of the Pakistan army's Ninth division: six thousand men who dug in, waiting for the Indian army to attack. Tough And then, as the Indian army's own Ninth division swept into the city, Pakistanis who are well trained and tough soldiers, fled to the river forty miles away. In their advance on the city, the Indians defeated four-and-a-half Pakistani battalions and then halted on the outskirts to watch another two-and-a-half battalionssome 2.000 men-suddenly turn and retreat in lorries and commandeered buses and bicycles and rickshaws. Some 300 of them, many of them with their wives and families, have reached a town twelve miles away where they are tonight surrounded. Major-General Dalbir Singh, the Indian commander said: "We don't know what to do with them. "We have asked them to come out with their hands up. If they do not do as we say, we shall have to finish them off."
