Abrar Fahad, a second-year student (17th batch) of electrical and electronic engineering at BUET, returned to his hall from his village home in Kushtia on 6 October 2019. At 8pm he was summoned to room 2011 on the first floor of Sher-e-Bangla Hall by several third-year students who were leaders of the BUET Chhatra League.
According to witnesses’ accounts, after going through his mobile phone and finding anti-India posts and views on Facebook and Messenger, they began beating him mercilessly with cricket stumps. Fourth-year leaders and activists later came and tortured him again.
After a night of brutal torture, Abrar at one point went limp.
What was in the post he had written only two days before his death?
He wrote that after the partition of 1947 the western part of the country had no seaport. The government of the day asked India for the use of Kolkata port for six months, but was told to mind its own road. It was forced to open Mongla port before its inauguration to fight famine. By a cruel irony of fate, he wrote, India now had to hold out its hand for the use of that same Mongla port.
He wrote: “The Kannadigas and Tamils tearing at each other over the release of Kaveri river water made headlines a few years ago. In a country where one state will not give water to another, we will give 150,000 cubic metres of water a day in return for nothing.”
He also wrote: “A few years ago north India stopped exporting coal and stone on the plea of protecting its own resources, yet we will give them gas. Where we have to shut our own factories for want of gas, we will light a friend’s lamp with our own resources.”
Towards the end of the post he quoted a poet’s lines on the happiness of giving up one’s own interest for the sake of others.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report