New Age; Date: April 15, 2009
Staff Correspondent
A manpower trader on Monday sued major Sarwar, an army officer, his cousin Saiful Islam and the latter’s associate Abdus Samad, on charge of torturing him during the emergency regime.
The businessman, Shamsuddin Ahmed, filed the case with Dhaka chief metropolitan magistrate’s court.
Shamsuddin in his complaint stated that a team of joint forces in plainclothes and led by major Sarwar, along with Saiful and Samad, had raided his Naya Paltan office on July 26, 2007 and beaten him up mercilessly.
They took him to a makeshift camp of the joint forces at the Paltan Community Centre and tortured him again there.
‘As I fainted because of the torture, I was first admitted to the Rajarbagh Police Line Hospital and shifted to Dhaka Medical College Hospital when my condition deteriorated,’ Shamsuddin told the magistrate.
The joint forces later handed Shamsuddin over to the Paltan Police to show him arrested in a fraud case filed with the police station by Saiful on July 26, 2007.
Shamsuddin was released on bail on August 6, 2007.
On February 2, 2008, Shamsuddin was acquitted by metropolitan magistrate Golam Rabbani of the fraud charges after investigation officer Ikramul Haque, sub-inspector of the Paltan police station, had submitted the final report in the case, Shamsuddin said.
Explaining the delay in filing the case, Shamsuddin told the court, ‘I could not file the case against the army officer when a state of emergency was in force fearing more torture.’
Human Rights lawyer Shahnur Islam Saikot, on behalf of the Bangladesh Institute of Human Rights (BIHR), appeared for Shamsuddin.
