“He is my only son… if he dies, how shall I live?” wept Asma Begum, the mother of Shanto, a class III student who sustained severe injuries from rubber bullets in the Mothijil-Fakirapul area around Friday noon — an instance of collateral damage in the fierce clashes between the police and Jamaat-Shibir activists in the city. The Jamaat-Shibir activists were protesting against the execution of Jamaat leader Quader Mollah for his war crimes. After the incident, the child was brought to the emergency department and later admitted to the casualty ward of the Dhaka Medical College Hospital in a critical condition.
It was a heartrending sight: his mother wept madly when many reporters from different print and electronic media organisations gathered there. Shanto was lying unconscious on the floor as he had not been provided any bed.
“Why did I bring my son to Dhaka, why, why,” she said, tears gushing from her eyes.
“We are helpless people, please, please, do something for us,” she pleaded with the journalists, claiming that the doctors were not taking proper care of her son.
Seeing the condition of his son deteriorate, Sobhan, a middle-aged footpath vendor, cried out in agony when the journalist asked him about the terrible incident. Somehow he managed to narrate: “Recently I set up a new shop on a footpath in Fakirapul area. As there was a vacation in his school, I brought my son from my village home in Barishal to the city to help me. But I never imagined he would be wounded.”
He added, “Shanto and his elder brother Shaon came to my shop with food for me, just after the Jumma prayer. I told them to return home quickly. As they were going back home, Shanto was caught in the fierce clash between the police and Jamaat-Shibir activists.”
The family lived at Rupganj area in Narayanganj district.
Talking to the reporters, physicians on duty said on condition of anonymity that Shanto was not out of danger as he had sustained several rubber bullet injuries in his entire body, including his head. The rubber bullets would have to be removed by a surgical operation which is very difficult, they explained.
However, talking to The Independent on Friday evening, an assistant commissioner of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP), who did not wish to be named as he was not entitled to talk to the media, claimed that any person who is wounded by rubber bullets is normally out of danger if he is injured from a distance of five feet. “It is very difficult to determine who would be hit by the pellets from the plastic casing as they spread,” the AC explained, when asked how such collateral damage can be prevented.
-With The Independent input
