বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ পঞ্চদশ খন্ড
For the next 36 hours, confined to our house in Gulshan and cut off from telephonic contact we could only hear the sounds of genocide. On the moring of 27th March the curfew was lifted. For some reason the first thing I did that same morning was to walk across to the Ford Foundation guest house in Gulshan where Daniel Thorner, who was a visiting scholar from Sorbonne at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics was staying. I asked him to immediately drive over to Dhanmondi to ascertain if the Nurul Islam were alright. When I returned home I found my friend Muyeedul Hasan and Mr. A Alam of Pakistan Tobacco waiting for me. Muyeed wanted me to leave the house immediately. According to him the army had already begun killing people on a large scale. He had contacted Kamal Hossain's house and had heard that the army had been there to pick him up, but that Kamal had not been in the house.
I had not myself appreciated that I would be a target for the army since till that time One had assumed that the army would go for those who were political activists. Muyeed however advised against taking chances on this and suggested I should move out of my house.
I was reluctant to do this, feeling that this would leave no family exposed to danger but my wife fell that, if anything, my presence could be a danger to them and that she would in my case be freer to get out of the house and Dhaka to leave me free to contribute to the liberation war.
With much reluctance I therefore left my family and moved that morning to another house within Gulshan. Muyeed reported to me in the afternoon that he had been to the University quarters where there was evidence of a massacre. The block of flats occupied by Prof. Abdur Razzaque and Prof. Anisur Rahman, opposite Jagannath Hall, had a pool of blood on the floor and staircase and was deserted. There were reports that Prof. Razzaque had been killed by the army. This knowledge deeply disturbed me not only because he was one of our closest friends but that this indicated that the army had widened its target to include people who were not directly involved in current events.
I spent the night of 27th in my new refuge. The next morning Muyeed visited me and reported that the previous evening, just after curfew, the army had come to my house to pick me up. As I heard later from my wife two truckloads of Pakistani army troops, led by Col. Sayeeduddin, had come to our house. This Colonel Claimed the distinction of having led the assault party which took Bangabandhu into custody from his house on Road 32, Dhanmondi, on the night of 25th March.
My oldest son Taimur, who was then just 8 years old, was in our house when it was invaded by the troops of the Pakistan army. He was asked by Col. Sayeeduddin about my whereabouts and appears to have handled himself quite coolly in the face of these gun toting soldiers marauding around our house. My wife Salma, on hearing of the arrival of the troops and fearing for Taimur, had tried to rush back to the house but was prevented at gun point from entering it. Col. Sayeeduddin questioned our neighbors about my whereabouts. When he heard that I had only left the house this morning he wanted to take my wife and sons hostage to the cantonment in the hope that, 'this would flush me out' Our neighbors however persuaded him to leave them behind.
The knowledge that the Pakistan army had paid me the compliment of wanting to
