prevails in Last Pakistan, where the mass killing of unarmed civilians, the systematic elimination of the intelligentsia” was in progress.
Simon drink, a correspondent of the Daily Telegraph was an eye-witness of the Dacca carnage. He said that on the morning of March 26 the army went about for eleven hours systematically destroying the entire old city of Dacca. People were burnt inside their homes. As people fled put of the city troops followed them. Drik narrated how people asleep in a bazar had been shot dead and in the morning were still lying there with the rugs on them as if they were still sleeping.
In two of the old city’s largest bazars the stench of dead and burning bodies was so overpowering that the survivors had to walk about with cloths over their nose. The stench of decomposed bodies pervaded the air in almost every locality of Dacca. The Pakistani troops carried truck loads of bodies to the banks of the rivers and dumped them there. An open field between the Jagannath Hall and the Rokeya Hall in the University area had been turned into a mass burial ground. People were forced by the troops to dig graves and, when they had finished, they themselves were machine-gunned by the troops. Dacca was stinking with decomposed bodies still littered on streets even a fortnight after the military operations had begun.
At Rajshahi, the Medical and the Engineering Colleges were repeatedly bombed. So were the T. B. Hospital and the Muslim School. Pakistani troops advancing on Rajshahi destroyed everything in their way. Shouting ‘jai Bangla’ slogans and without uniforms they stormed Rajshahi and the adjoining villages on April 13 and went berserk as they gunned down civilians and set the town on fire. Terrorized civilians trying to cross the Padma river were ruthlessly machine-gunned by troops waiting for them at the riverside. Women and children floundered and were drowned as machine-gun bullets sprayed the river and heavy motor shells fell midstream.
Fleeing refugees were brutally murdered in other places as well. For days Pakistan Air Force fighters, flaying low, machine-gunned stress of refuges on the Sylhet-Churkhai-Sutarkandi road. The planes flew over wide areas in search of the fleeing persons and as soon as they caught sight of them, the aircrafts swooped down to shower bullets. And the way every now and then to take spot shoots at fleeing villagers or to burn roadside villages”.
A Danish Student who was in Chittagong till April 4 narrated stories of atrocities committed by the Pakistani troops on the civil population there. Children were killed in a village on the outskirts of Chittagong as the troops fired from machine-guns at some of the mud houses there. In the city they shot many people. At one shop about fifteen people were buying food. The soldiers ordered them to come out and as they obeyed the troops lined them up and fired. Only one escaped with two bullet bullet wounds. All the others were killed. The Danish student said that on March 31, the army started burning the cantonment area and along Dacca Road, during the next three days. The New Market in Chittagong was
