Bangladesh pays homage to its sharpest minds on Martyred Intellectuals Day

Bangladesh is paying homage on Thursday to the victims of the indiscriminate killing of the nation’s sharpest minds by the Pakistani Army and its collaborators on Dec 14, 1971 during the Liberation War.

Staff Correspondentbdnews24.com
Published : 14 Dec 2017, 04:23 AM
Updated : 14 Dec 2017, 07:26 AM

Sensing defeat in the Liberation War in 1971, the Pakistani occupation army and its collaborators killed many university teachers, doctors, artists, writers, journalists and other prominent Bengalis on Dec 14, 1971, just two days before their surrender, in a desperate act of vengeance.

They were systematically rounded up from their homes in the middle of the night, taken to torture cells throughout the city, brutalised for hours, and finally assembled on various killing fields and executed en masse.

The bodies of the slain intellectuals were found with marks of tortures in the capital’s Mirpur and Rayerbazar where the monuments have been built to immortalise them.

The nation is paying tribute to them by placing wreaths from early morning on Thursday with President Md Abdul Hamid paying homage at the memorial in Dhaka’s Mirpur.

Tributes have been paid on behalf of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, now on her way to Dhaka from Paris, where she attended the One Planet Summit.

In his message on the eve of Martyred Intellectuals Day, the president called upon all to be imbued with the spirit of patriotism of the martyred intellectuals and work together to develop a merit-based nation.

Hasina in her message said in the history of the liberation struggle of the Bangalee nation, Martyred Intellectuals Day is a ‘painful occasion’.

She said the anti-liberation forces wanted to deprive the nation of its best intellectual wealth by killing them.

The prime minister said, "I pay deep respect to their memory and express profound sympathies to the bereaved members of their families."