The one-man fact-finding committee on June 6 submitted its report to the home affairs ministry on RAB’s shooting of Limon, a college student whose left leg had to be amputated afterwards.
Additional home affairs secretary Mohammad Iqbal Khan Chowdhury received the report at noon.
Barisal’s additional divisional commissioner, Shawkat Akbar, who comprised the one-member committee, interviewed 12 persons including Limon, his father and a doctor.
Shawkat, however, refused to say anything about his findings to the reporters. When asked if the report would be made public, Iqbal replied, ‘The decision will be taken after the home minister comes home.’
Shawkat expressed his satisfaction over his investigation and said that he got the cooperation of every concerned person and institution and could do his work ‘without any pressure’.
The home affairs ministry, responding to a recommendation of the Human Rights Commission, assigned Shawkat Akbar to probe the shooting of Limon and submit a report in 15 working days, starting from April 29.
Shawkat was later given an additional time of seven more days, from May 23 to 29, to complete the job.
RAB personnel are alleged to have shot Limon for no reason and without first seeking to verify his identity when he was bringing his family’s cows home from a grazing field in his village in the afternoon of March 23.
He received treatment in Sher-e-Bangla Medical College Hospital in Barisal about eight hours after the incident, and in the interval he lost an excess of blood. He was referred to the National Institute of Traumatology and Orthopaedic Rehabilitation in the capital where his left leg had to be amputated on March 27.
On March 23, RAB-8’s deputy assistant director Lutfar Rahman filed two First Information Reports against Limon and several others with the Rajapur thana, claiming that they possessed arms and ammunition, had obstructed law enforcers from discharging their duties and were involved in attempted murder.
The subsequent charge-sheet accuses Limon of being an armed terrorist ‘arrested with arms and ammunition after a gunfight between his gang and RAB members’.
Limon was suffering in jail but is now out on bail.
On April 10, Limon’s mother filed a complaint case with the Jhalakathi magistrate’s court which issued an order to the police to treat it as a First Information Report.
The Rajapur police, which had refused to file a case when Limon’s mother had approached them, sought a review of the magistrate’s order in the Jhalakathi district and sessions judge’s court which, on 26 April, upheld the lower court’s order.
Courtesy of New Age
