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 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.
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."