Shagufta Tabassum Ahmed agreed to study law on the advice of her parents, although she had no intention of becoming a lawyer. But that changed when her father was killed. Shagufta told the BBC’s gender correspondent, Megha Mohan, about the fight of 16 years in search of justice against the murderers of his father.
This is his story.
The memories of the day I heard that my father, Dr. Taher Ahmed, had been assassinated are crystal clear and murky and incomplete.
I remember the room, but I don’t remember who was in it. It was a Friday, but I don’t remember the time. I remember hearing the landline phone ring, but I don’t remember who in my family answered it.
It was my brother calling.
“They found him. They have killed him”.
I am not sure who transmitted my brother’s words at that time, but life I knew ended.
My mother immediately burst into tears.
Then we sat in stunned silence when we heard that my father’s lifeless body had been found in a septic tank at Rajshahi University, where he worked as a professor in the Geology and Mining department.
All our extended family had gathered at my brother’s house in the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka.
He was not with us anymore that the previous day he had traveled six hours by car to the city of Rajshahi, near the border between Bangladesh and India, in search of our father.
My family began to speak at the same time, stopping each other.
” How? Why?”.
“Who would want to kill him?”.
My father, the unassuming academic who preferred to walk or take public transport instead of buying a fancy car, the university professor whose students seemed to adore him, the husband who shared food shopping and cooking while this was still unusual in Bangladesh, the father whose hand he still held as he crossed the road at the age of 18 years…
Who could want a man like that dead?
This question would only be the beginning of our family’s nightmare.
Two days before, on Wednesday, February 1, 2006, my father had taken a bus from Dhaka to Rajshahi University .
He loved the bustling and vibrant campus, which had been my childhood home. We lived in a small house provided by the university on site and everything we needed was close by.
My brother Sanzid and I walked to school in the morning and spent the afternoons with other children’s children. college professors at the many nearby playgrounds.
We knew everyone on campus. It was a happy and safe corner of the world for us.
Photographs of Shagufta and her father in the family album. (Photo: SALMAN SAEED)With the passage of time Sanzid and I left school and moved to Dhaka. Sanzid started working in HR for a large multinational.
Following his advice, which was incredibly prescient given what was to come, I studied Law at university.
However, I had no intention of becoming a practicing lawyer. I thought that maybe after I got my degree I would join an international non-governmental organization or become an academic.
But my father seemed to know what would be best for our family even then.
I started university in 2006 and my mother came to live with me in Dhaka, when I settled.
The week he died, my father had come to Dhaka to visit us all for a few days and left for Rajshahi in the early afternoon of Wednesday 1st February 2006.
He called my mother to inform her that he had arrived safely and, a few hours later, just before 18: 00 hours, he called her back
I guess she then got ready for bed. Later, the police would find the pants that she was wearing when she left us in Dhaka. The pants were hanging on the bedroom doorknob.
he would only be alive for a short time. The coroner later said he was killed before of the night.
My father had returned to Rajshahi to attend a meeting about the future of a colleague, Dr. Mia Mohammad Mohiuddin.
Mohiuddin had been a close friend of the family, but the relationship between him and my father had abruptly ended shortly before.
My father had discovered several cases of plagiarism at work of Mohiuddin and had raised it with the teaching staff.
A meeting had been arranged to discuss how the department would handle this controversy.
But my father did not know presented to that meeting. He also did not respond to our calls. The university janitor, Jahangir Alam, said that he was not in the house and strangely added that he had not seen him arrive at all.
Alarmed, my mother asked my brother to travel to Rajshahi that night to look for him.
The next day, February 3, 2006, my brother found the my father’s body in a septic tank in the garden of the university residence. This was now a murder investigation.
For a moment, the eyes of the world seemed to turn towards my family.
The death of my father was a great story, a murder mystery, a true crime whodunit.
My father’s face appeared on television and in the newspapers. The international and local media searched for lurid details that would make a compelling story: good, popular, healthy men don’t die this way.
Our family tragedy turned into a newsroom drama with many unanswered questions. answer.
Who would kill a respected university professor? Was it a personal grudge? Hardline Islamists? What did this say about Bangladeshi society?
The coroner found that my father had been physically attacked before he was killed.
In In the midst of the pandemonium, I was in awe of my brother and my mother. They sprang into action. My mother joined my brother in Rajshahi to help the police, draw up a schedule and check all the suspects.
Within a matter of weeks, Dr. Mia Mohammad Mohiuddin, the colleague whom my father had accused of plagiarism; the university’s caretaker, Jahangir Alam; and four other people, including Alam’s brother and brother-in-law, were arrested and charged with my father’s murder.
Shagufta as a child on her father’s knee. (Photo: SALMAN SAEED)During the trial, Jahangir Alam and his relatives testified that Mohiuddin had persuaded them to kill my father with promises of money, computers, and college jobs.
Mohiuddin denied the accusations.
In 2008, four of the men were found guilty in the Rajshahi Magistrates Court and sentenced to death, and two were acquitted.
The case should have ended there, but it did not. The four men appealed and the case was referred to the Bangladesh High Court.
My mother and brother worked tirelessly to achieve justice for my father. On the contrary, I felt useless.
When the judgment of the Court of First Instance was handed down, I had barely left adolescence and was still immensely immature.
My family had protected me all my life and, even after my father’s death, they insisted that my only goal should be to complete college.
They supported me, both emotionally and financially.
I persevered in my studies, trying to concentrate on my law books, but I still wasn’t sure what to do with my life.
In 2011, my father’s murder case went to the High Court. Mia Mohammad Mohiuddin, the colleague whom my father had accused of plagiarism, was released on bail by the court and released during the trial.
He had hired more than 10 lawyers and his defense was clearly going to to be sophisticated.
Suddenly, my future came into focus. I knew what I could do with my life. I could use my law degree to help in the prosecution case against my father’s murderers.
I was in a unique position, encompassing various dimensions. I could contact my family and translate legal jargon documents for them.
I knew the police, I knew my father, I even knew two of the defendants. It could be essential in this case to achieve justice for my father.
I graduated from the Faculty of Law in 2012 and immediately started helping the prosecuting attorneys.
In Bangladesh there are not many practicing female lawyers in criminal court cases, but everyone could see my value and I was a welcome part of the team.
This was where I spent every waking moment. I turned down other cases to focus solely on my father.
In 2013, the Superior Court passed judgment. Upheld the death sentence for Mia Mohammad Mohiuddin, as well as for the university’s caretaker, Jahangir Alam.
But the other two men, relatives of Alam, had their death sentences reduced to life in prison.
The judge determined that they had helped, but that it was Mohiuddin and Alam who intellectual authors of the murder of my father.
It was not over yet.
The The janitor, Jahangir Alam, and his relatives had confessed to my father’s murder, and all claimed that Mohiuddin approached them and paid them.
However, Mohiuddin’s lawyers filed another appeal, this before the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh, the highest appellate court in the country.
I pored over documents, prepared notes, arranged schedules, outlined criminal profiles, talked to lawyers, and kept the encouragement of my brother and my mother.
I worked nights, weekends, several Ramadans that we spent praying and keeping in sight our goal, justice and peace for our father.
Now she was a determined lawyer, about 30 years, with a mission. She was no longer the nervous teenager whose world had ended in 2006
But we had to accept the times of the courts. We waited eight long years for the appeal case to be heard.
Dr. Mohiuddin is a wealthy and well-connected man , his brother-in-law is an influential politician from Bangladesh.
He had resources and a large team of lawyers at his disposal.
These lawyers argued that he had had nothing to to do with my father’s murder, that he and my father had always been close friends and that there was no physical evidence against him, it was all circumstantial.
It does not matter that the other three men gave detailed confessions or that their behavior afterwards was not what you would expect from someone close to our family.
Mohiuddin, the man who had visited us so often in previous years, stayed away from my father’s funeral; he was the only faculty member who did not attend.
He also did not visit our family to offer us support.
The Supreme Court, with a backlog of cases, did not include my father’s case until the end of last year, and it was only on April 5, 2022 that the magistrates of the Court, led by Judge Hasan Foez Siddique and a full court of five other judges, concluded that Mia Mohammad Mohiuddin was guilty of murdering my father and upheld her death sentence.
After the trial, I released a statement on behalf of my family saying that we were happy with the verdict, but I’m not sure “happy” is the right word.
I still don’t have the words to describe how these last ones have been 16 years for our family. It has been an unimaginable pain.
Sometimes I wonder if I will ever feel peace knowing that my father died the way he did.
The fight to bring justice and peace for my father has dominated my adulthood, to the point that my own life has been put on hold.
People ask me if I will seek to settle down and form my own family. I may do it after my father’s killers are dead. Then you may feel like this is over.
My father was my whole world , he was a very good, decent, simple and wise man.
What the assassins did to my father, simply because Mohiuddin risked losing his job, is unthinkable, but for him I will continue , I will fight for justice and live a good life.
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