A Dhaka court has dismissed a case application filed against the former chief adviser of the interim government, Dr. Muhammad Yunus, former health adviser Nur Jahan Begum and two others, in which a father alleged that his daughter had died of measles because of negligence. Dhaka Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Jashita Islam passed the order dismissing the application on Sunday.
The application was filed by the father of a nine-month-old girl who died on July 5. That day the court recorded the complainant’s statement and kept its order pending, later saying the order would be given on July 12. The complainant’s lawyer, Taslima Jahan Popi, confirmed the information. The other two accused named in the application are Dr. Yunus’s press secretary, Shafiqul Alam, and the former director general of the Directorate General of Health Services, Dr. Md. Abu Zafar.
The application alleged that the infant suddenly developed a high fever between late February and early March; medicine bought from a local pharmacy did not bring the fever down; she was admitted to Dhaka Medical College Hospital in the first week of March; and, as her condition steadily worsened, the father admitted her again on March 22, where, the complainant alleged, doctors and nurses were uncooperative and negligent. The infant died under treatment on March 26. The complainant alleged a lack of timely, adequate vaccine supply for children, a failure by hospital authorities to take proper measures, and “grave recklessness” on the part of the interim government.
The application further alleged that, because measles vaccine was not imported in time and children under the age of two were therefore not vaccinated against measles in time, the “grave negligence and wrong decisions” of the Yunus government and its state machinery after August 5, 2024, had led to the deaths of more than 600 children at various levels across the country, despite the necessary budget allocation for the deadly measles vaccine and repeated reminders from the World Health Organization. The infant, the complaint said, was one of them, and the accused, being at the highest level of the state machinery, bore responsibility, having taken no effective steps to prevent measles-related child deaths and being liable and punishable under existing law.
Earlier, on June 8, former Kishoreganj-5 member of parliament Sheikh Mojibur Rahman Iqbal had filed a similar application, on the same allegation, against Dr. Muhammad Yunus, former health adviser Nur Jahan Begum and five others in a Dhaka court. That application was also dismissed.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report