পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (পঞ্চদশ খণ্ড).pdf/২৯৬

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বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ পঞ্চদশ খন্ড

pick me up within the first 48 hours of their operation indicated that I was now a designated target. Muyeed advised me that I should get out of Dhaka as there would be house to house search which would put into at risk anyone who gave me shelter. There was at that stage no foreknowledge of what course the war would take or our role in it. I sent a note to my wife asking her to get away from Dhaka and preferably abroad so that I could be more freely active in the cause of the Liberation struggle.

 Preparatory to my getting out of Dhaka, Muyeed took me over to the residence of Moklesur Rahman (Shidu Mian) in Gulshan. From there I move across the river from Gulshan to the village of Baraid, to the house of Shidu Mian's father-in-law, Mr. Matin. Walking across the fields from Gulshan to the village of Baraid I merged with the vast exodus of the population of Dhaka feeling the city and heading for the Village In this exodus I ran into Anisur Rahman, from whom I heard of the horrors he had lived through on the night of 25/26 March. He narrated how the army had invaded their block of flats and shot dead Prof. Jotyrmoy Guha Thakurta of the English Department of Dhaka University who lived on the ground floor and Prof. Maniruzaman of statistics who lived on the top floor of the buildings. Prof. Razzaque was spared only by providence. Some Pakistani soldiers had banged at the door to his flat on the first floor of the flat. He took some time to come to open it. They took this to mean that his flat was empty and moved on before he could open it. Anis who lived opposite Prf. Razzaque, was spared by the fact that he had put a lock on one of the doors leading into his flat which again suggested from the outside that it was empty. Anis had spent two nights and a day on the floor of his flat with his wife and two daughters, with the army going up and downs the stairs carrying out the bodies of their victims.

 At the village home of Mr. Matin in Baraid we came across a number of other friends such as Jamil Chowdhury and his family. Mokammel Haq who was son-in law to Mr. Matin and his family and Mostafa Monwar of Dhaka Television. At Baraid it was decided that since I was a direct target of the army and so might Anis be, we should get across the border into India and then launch a campaign to seek international support for the cause of Bangladesh.

 In the early morning of 29th March, Anisur Rahman, Mostafa Monwar and myself, guided by a relation of Mr. Matin, Mr. Rahmatullah and Mr. Rasheed, who was a school teacher in the area, set out for Agartala across the border. We were seen off at the river's edge by Shidu Mian and Muyeed.

 From there we crossed the Sitalakhya by 'nauka' and headed for Narsingdi. All the way we came across people fleeing from Dhaka. At Narsinghdi we were to take a launch across the river to Brahmanbaria. Upto this point we had only seen a demoralized population fleeing army terror in Dhaka. We had heard rumours of resistance in Chittagong but nothing more to indicate that a full scale war of resistance had begun. The first direct signs of this appeared to us when we sighted the Bangladesh flag flown by the launch which came across the river Meghna to pick up passengers at Narsingdi..