Walking in Park
Ex-army men beat up 4 students
Security guards and retired army officers beat up four A-level students, tied them up, and confined them to a room for six hours for walking on the Baridhara DOHS Park the wrong way. The park has a policy of one-way pedestrian walking, like one-way traffic movement on some city streets.
The students are: Mushfiqur Rahman, Tasbeer Islam, Fahad Hussain and Prithu Amin. They are all students of Scholastica school.
The families of the victims claimed that around 30 security guards and four retired army officials–two of them identified as Brig Gen (retd) Zakir Hossain and Lt Col (retd) Azizul Ashraf–beat them up around 8:15pm Thursday.
Victim Mushfiqur told The Daily Star, “They dragged us to the guardroom, tied us with ropes and beat us with truncheons.”
He said that evening he along with his friends paid a visit to Fahad, who lives in the DOHS, and later they all decided to go for a walk in the park. He said they started walking anti-clockwise.
He claimed that Zakir Hossain appeared and asked them why they were walking anti-clockwise and rebuked them.
Mushfiqur said they were unaware of the absurd rule of the park and they later learnt that there was actually a sign there which they did not see in the dark.
“At one stage he slapped me on my face and asked us to leave. Later, we sat down near the guardroom when Zakir Hossain showed up again with guard chief sergeant Abdus Salam and around 30 guards. They beat us up and dragged us into the guardroom where they kept us,” he added.
The guardians of the teenagers later rescued them.
A negotiation meeting of the DOHS parishad was held yesterday which decided to sack Abdus Salam and withdraw Azizul Ashraf from Baridhara DOHS Parishad.
The guardians present at the meeting expressed dissatisfaction as no action was taken against Zakir Hossain. They said they would think about filing a case against Zakir if no action is taken against him.
Zakir Hossain claimed that he went to the spot and tried to make the students understand that they were walking in the wrong direction and that the teenagers misbehaved with him. He only tried to calm the situation down, Zakir claimed.
Azizul Ashraf said he was not involved in the matter. He said he went there hearing hue and cry from the guardroom.
Courtesy of The Daily Star
