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 gender correspondent of the BBCMegha Mohan, how was the 16-year fight for justice against her father’s murderers.
This is his story.
The memories of the day I heard that my father, Dr. Taher Ahmed, had been assassinated are crystal clear and cloudy 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 have found it. They have killed him.”
I’m not sure who conveyed my brother’s words at the time, But the life that I knew ended.
My mother immediately burst into tears.
We then 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 department of Geology and Mining.
Our entire extended family had gathered at my brother’s house in the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka.
He was not with us as the day before he had traveled six hours by car to the town of Rajshahi, near the Bangladesh-India border, in search of our father.
My family started talking at once, interrupting each other.
“How? Why?”.
“Who would want to kill him?”
My father, the unassuming academic who preferred to walk or take public transportation rather than buy a fancy car, the college 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 street at the age of 18…
Who could want a man like that dead?
This question would be just the beginning of our family’s nightmare.
Two days earlier, 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 the children of other university professors in the many nearby playgrounds.
We knew everyone on campus. It was a happy and safe corner of the world for us.
As time passed 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 down.
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, February 1, 2006.
He called my mother to let her know that he had arrived safely, and a few hours later, just before 9:00 p.m., he called her again.
I imagine he then got ready for bed. Later, the police would find the pants she was wearing when she left us in Dhaka. The pants hung from the bedroom doorknob.
He would only be alive for a short time. The coroner later said he was killed before 10 p.m.
My father had returned to Rajshahi to attend a meeting on 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 a short time before.
My father had discovered several instances of plagiarism in Mohiuddin’s work and 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 show up for that meeting. He also did not respond to our calls. The university’s janitor, Jahangir Alam, said that he was not at the house and strangely added that he had not seen him arrive in absolute.
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 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 to my family.
My father’s death was a great story, a murder mystery, a true crime whodunit.
My father’s face appeared on television and in the newspapers. 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.
Who would kill a respected college professor? was it a grudge personal? Hardline Islamists? What did this say about Bangladeshi society?
The coroner discovered that my father he had been physically attacked before he was killed.
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 timetable and check all the suspects.
Within 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.
During the trial, Jahangir Alam and his relatives testified that Mohiuddin had persuaded them to kill my father with promises of money, computers and university jobs.
Mohiuddin He denied the accusations.
In 2008, four of the men were found guilty at the Rajshahi Magistrate’s Court and sentenced to death, and two were acquitted.
The case should have ended there, but it didn’t. The four men appealed and the case was referred to the Bangladesh High Court.
My mother and brother worked tirelessly to get justice for my father. On the contrary, I felt useless.
When the judgment of the Court of First Instance was delivered, she was barely out of her teens and still immature in the extreme.
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. The court granted bail to Mia Mohammad Mohiuddin, the colleague whom my father had accused of kidnapping, and he was released during the trial.
He had hired more than 10 lawyers and his defense was clearly going 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 the prosecution’s case. against the murderers of my father.
It was in a unique position, encompassing several dimensions. I could contact my family and translate legal jargon documents for them.
He knew the police, he knew my father, he even knew two of the defendants. It could be essential in this case to achieve justice for my father.
I graduated from law school in 2012 and immediately began helping 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 High Court passed judgment. He 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 Mohiuddin and Alam were the intellectual authors of the murder of my father.
It wasn’t over yet.
The janitor, Jahangir Alam, and his relatives had confessed to my father’s murder, all claiming that Mohiuddin approached them and paid them.
However, Mohiuddin’s lawyers filed another appeal, this time to the Appellate Division of the Bangladesh Supreme Court, the country’s highest court of appeal.
I pored over documents, prepared notes, organized schedules, drafted criminal profiles, talked to lawyers, and kept my brother’s and mother’s spirits up.
I worked nights, weekends, several Ramadans that we spent praying and keeping our goal in sight, justice and peace for our father.
Now she was a determined lawyer, in her 30s, on 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 rich and well-connected man, her brother-in-law is an influential politician from Bangladesh.
He had resources and a great team of lawyers at his disposal.
These attorneys argued that he had nothing 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 doesn’t 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.
Nor did he 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, headed 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 his 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 what the last 16 years have been like for our family. It has been an unimaginable pain.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ll 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 start 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 killers did to my father, simply because Mohiuddin was at risk of losing his job, is unthinkable, but for him I will continue, fight for justice and live a good life.