Case documents state that Major (retd) Md Mozaffar Hossain fired the first shot at President Ziaur Rahman in cold blood. After nearly four and a half decades on the run in disguise, he has been arrested from Dhaka’s Banani DOHS by detective (DB) police. Investigators say the operation that caught the convicted man was carried out on leads from his daughter’s workplace and a mole below his nose.
Records show Major (retd) Md Mozaffar Hossain was one of the principal planners of the military coup of 31 May 1981 and an active member of the killing squad. Late on the night of 30 May 1981, a group of renegade army officers attacked the Chittagong Circuit House and killed the then president, Ziaur Rahman. After a military inquiry and a long judicial process, 13 army officers were given the maximum penalty, and Mozaffar Hossain was among them; he had been a fugitive ever since.
According to the case file and investigation records, Mozaffar’s role that night was especially terrible: during the attack he and Captain Mosleh Uddin advanced directly toward the president’s room, and Mozaffar was the first to bring President Ziaur Rahman out of the room and identify him — and, the case narrative states, he then fired directly at the president in cold blood. Immediately afterward he telephoned the then GOC of Chittagong Cantonment’s 24 Infantry Division, Major General Abul Manzur, with a message in English: “The president has been killed.” When government forces regained control on 31 May 1981, the coup’s ringleader Major General Manzur and many others were arrested, and Manzur was later killed; but Mozaffar Hossain and Major SM Khaled managed to slip across the border and escape.
A DB officer said Mozaffar was a prime example of the lengths criminals go to in order to evade the law, changing his looks, bearing, profession and residence to live under a wholly different identity, leaving no clear clue to his whereabouts — but a recorded physical marker, the mole below his nose, gave him away when a disguised detective team called at the house late on Wednesday night. DMP DB additional commissioner Shafiqul Islam said: “He was a former military officer and a fugitive convicted through court martial. So, after completing the necessary legal formalities, he has been handed over to the army’s own judicial process.” After the coup failed in May 1981 and GOC Major General Abul Manzur was killed, Mozaffar and his associate Major SM Khaled crossed into neighbouring India; intelligence reports say he spent long years there, around 1997-98 living in various Indian states, erasing his real identity, taking a new alias and cutting off family contact so no surveillance could find him. Using forged Indian documents he obtained a passport and travelled to several countries, which is why Interpol and Bangladeshi intelligence found no trace of him under his real name for so long, until he returned in secret and settled in Banani DOHS.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report