Asif Nazrul, a former law adviser to the previous interim government, has called on Sheikh Hasina, the former prime minister ousted in the student-people’s uprising, to return home and face the legal process. If she genuinely wishes to come back, he said, there is no need to wait until December; she should return now and put her case before the courts.
In a post on Facebook on Saturday, Asif Nazrul wrote: “Why wait until December? Sheikh Hasina, come back to the country now.” Welcoming the ousted former prime minister’s stated wish to return, he wrote that the interim government had formally asked India to send Sheikh Hasina back, and that the current BNP government had taken the same step, saying it wants to bring her under the law and try her. Sheikh Hasina, too, had expressed interest in returning, he noted – “and if that is true, then why wait until December?”
“You have many questions to answer before the people of Bangladesh and before the courts,” he wrote. “What is your response to the responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of people during the July uprising?” The former adviser said Sheikh Hasina should also explain allegations relating to her rule, including the BDR killings, the Shapla Chattar killings, extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, the “Aynaghar” secret detention sites, and large-scale corruption and money laundering, and why the people had been deprived of their voting rights for so long.
In the final part of the post, Asif Nazrul wrote that Sheikh Hasina had sent every member of her family abroad in advance during the July uprising, while countless ordinary Awami League leaders and workers had been left to bear the political and legal consequences of her government’s actions, many of them still facing cases or uncertainty. “If you have really decided to return, then do not delay any further,” he wrote. “Come back, face the law and present your position in court. And if you have no real plan to return, do not repeatedly announce that you will, and put your own party’s ordinary leaders and workers into confusion or needless risk.”
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report