789 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ দ্বিতীয় খন্ড শিরোনাম সূত্র তারিখ ঢাকার গণহত্যার উপর সায়মন ড্রিং-এর প্রতিবেদন ডেইলি টেলিগ্রাফ ৩০ মার্চ ১৯৭১ GENOCIDE IN BANGLADESH SOME EYE-WITNESS ACCOUNTS "HOW DACCA PAID FOR A UNITED' PAKISTAN” Report by Simon Dring of Daily Telegraph, London. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, East Pakistan's popular political leader was seen being taken away by the army, and nearly all the top members of his Awami League Party have also been arrested. Leading political activities have been arrested, others are dead, and the offices of two papers which supported Mujibur's movement have been destroyed. But the first target as the tanks rolled into Dacca on the night of Thursday, March 25, seems to have been the students. An estimated three battalions of troops were used in the attack on Dacca- one of armored, one of artillery and one of infantry. They started leaving their barracks shortly before 10 p.m. By 11, firing had broken out and the people who had started to erect makeshift barricades- overturned cars, three stumps, furniture, concrete pipingbecame early casualties. Sheikh Mujibur was warned by telephone that something was happening, but he refused to leave his house. "If I go into hiding they will burn the whole of Dacca to find me," he told an aide who escaped arrest. The students were also warned, but those who were still around later said that most of them thought they would only be arrested. Led by American supplied M-24 World War II tanks, one column of troops sped to Dacca University shortly after midnight. Troops took over the British Council Library and used it as a fire base from which to shell nearby dormitory areas. Caught completely by surprise, some 200 students were killed in Iqbal Hall, headquarters of the militantly anti-government student's union, I was told. Two days later, bodies were still smoldering in burnt-out rooms, others were scattered outside, more floated in a nearby lake, an art student lay sprawled across his easel. The military removed many of the bodies, but the 30 bodies till there could never have accounted for all the blood in the corridors of Iqbal Hall. At another hall, reportedly, soldiers buried the dead in a hastily dug mass grave which was then bull-dozed over by tanks. People living near the university were caught
