Staff Correspondent

While stressing the critical importance of the statements of deposed prime minister Sheikh Hasina and former Army chief Gen Moeen U Ahmed over the BDR carnage, the National Independent Inquiry Commission acknowledged the immense challenge of obtaining those.

“It’s very important to obtain the statements of the fugitives, including former prime minister Sheikh Hasina and former chief of Army staff Gen Moeen U Ahmed. However, reaching them remains the biggest challenge,” Maj Gen (retd) ALM Fazlur Rahman, chief of the commission, said on Thursday.

Speaking at a “Meet the Press” event at the Bangladesh Reference Institute for Chemical Measurements (BRICM), he said they want to interrogate them over the 2009 Pilkhana carnage.

The commission will interrogate those who were involved and witnesses to the incident, its chief said, adding that they will take the initiative through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to question them.

He said they have sent a letter to the ministry in this regard. “We extremely need their statements,” he said.

When he was reminded that Moeen U Ahmed has already written a book and given a video statement on the BDR massacre that took place on 25-26 February 2009, Fazlur Rahman posed a counter-question, saying why the commission will believe what he wrote in the book and delivered on the video. “We’ll interrogate him for what we want to know,” he said.

He said they have already taken testimonies of 37 former and incumbent army officers and BDR members and the family members of the martyrs.

They include three retired lieutenant generals, two retired major generals, five retired brigadier generals, four retired colonels, four retired lieutenant colonels and seven retired majors.

The commission will interrogate all others concerned gradually. If anybody wishes, he/she can provide information on the BDR massacre through the website bdr-commission.org.

The government gave the commission 90 working days to complete the inquiry. The commission has already passed 41 working days.