Bangladeshi teen guards home of family blamed for destroying his own

Dhaka, Bangladesh – AFP

Bangladeshi teen Mahir Sarowar Megh was five years old when he woke up to discover his parents, a prominent journalist couple, had been stabbed to death in their family home.

The gruesome 2012 murder outraged the country’s close-knit media fraternity and has never been solved, though rumours persist that they were killed because of their independent reporting under then-premier Sheikh Hasina.

Yet in the hours after the autocratic prime minister’s dramatic ouster and flight abroad, Megh rushed to Hasina’s childhood home to stop it from being further looted by the public.

“It’s a historical place,” the 18-year-old told AFP. “My mum and dad were good people. I’m just following in their steps.”

Megh was standing outside a stately compound in the capital Dhaka that belonged to Hasina’s father, and Bangladesh’s independence leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

It was also the household where Mujib and most of his family were gunned down during a 1975 military coup — a fate Hasina escaped as she was in Europe at the time.

When Hasina took office, she turned the house into a museum.

But she was also accused of building a cult of personality around her slain father to legitimise and entrench her own rule during her 15-year tenure.

Since Hasina took office a second time in 2009, Mujib’s visage has appeared on every banknote.

Her government also changed the constitution to require that his portraits be hung in every school, government office and diplomatic mission.

After she abruptly fled the country, pent-up public anger found its release in symbols of her father.

A crowd of around 1,000 people stormed the museum that day, torching and gutting the museum and an adjacent library dedicated to Mujib’s works.

But for Megh, despite his suspicion of Hasina’s involvement in his parents’ deaths, the destruction was unconscionable.

Were Mujib alive, he said, he would be “very frustrated” with his daughter’s legacy.

“She isn’t a good leader, she isn’t a good person,” he added.

– ‘I can guess’ –

Megh grew up in Dhanmondi, the same elite lakeside neighbourhood as Hasina’s family and just a short walk from her former household.

He still vividly recalls the morning he left his bedroom to find the bodies of his parents lying in pools of their own blood.

“I didn’t understand anything when I was just a kid,” he said.

Before their deaths, Sagar Sarowar and Meherun Runi were both feted reporters — a vocation whose practitioners were regularly subjected to pressure, harassment and worse under Hasina.

Police never formally identified a motive, nor could they say whether more than one attacker was involved, and the couple’s laptops and other personal effects were stolen on the night of their killing.

Fellow journalists accused investigators responsible for probing the murders of gross negligence for failing to make any headway 12 years since the crime.

“They don’t know who did this, but I can guess,” he added. “They just wanted to do journalism.”

– ‘No one listened’ –

Megh and several other students were standing guard outside Hasina’s old home on Saturday.

They were filling in for the police officers who would normally do the job but went on strike in the chaos after her ouster.

A barricade was set up at the end of the street.

“This place played a significant part in our freedom fight,” Fyaz, a 25-year-old engineering student at one of Dhaka’s top universities, told AFP.

“We students tried to preserve this place as a symbol of our freedom,” he added. “We tried to stop them, but no one listened to us.”