BNP’s claim regarding its official website emerges not to be true.
Following a recent controversy on BNP founder Ziaur Rahman’s presidency, the party had said http://bnpbd.org is its official website and that it is currently offline. The party had also declined to accept the http://bangladeshnationalistparty-bnp as its official one.
On March 26 & 27 BNP Vice Chairperson Tarique Rahman and Chairperson Khaleda Zia had claimed Ziaur Rahman was the first president of Bangladesh. Subsequently media reports pointed out that their claim was contradictory to the BNP official website, where Zia was noted as the seventh president.
On March 30, BNP Assistant Office Secretary Abdul Latif Jony claimed that BNP’s official website is www.bnpbd.org. Jony came up with the explanation while talking to a Bangladeshi online newspaper.
Noting that BNP Vice Chairperson Tarique was responsible for the bnpbd.org website, Jony said: “It has not been active since his arrest during the incidents of 1/11. The website is closed for over a month for reconstruction.”
However, a tech-procedural investigation by the Dhaka Tribune has found that BNP’s claim over bangladeshnationalistparty-bnp.org is not true.
Though BNP claims the bnpbd.org to be its official website, which they say is now under construction, it was set up to redirect to the bangladeshnationalistparty-bnp.org from January 2012.
The machine proves that the party’s other website www.bnpbd.org was redirected to the website www.bangladeshnationalistparty-bnp.org.
Dhaka Tribune debunked the party’s claims by means of the Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web created by the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization, located in San Francisco, California in the United States.
Bnpbd.org redirected
We ran a search for a http://bnpbd.org in the search bar on the Wayback machine here.
It was found that the Wayback machine preserved web-pages of bnpbd.org for dates between August 9, 2001 and March 8, 2014. In the early years, the Wayback machine saved pages from bnpbd.org.
However, contrary to BNP leader Jony’s claim the machine did save some pages when it was supposed to be offline.
A snapshot of the bnpbd.org saved at 1:24pm on June 19, 2012 shows that the website was redirected to bangaldeshnationalist party-bnp.org.
On clicking ‘History’ under the ‘BNP’ tab of the saved page a reader can reach the page where Ziaur Rahman is noted as seventh president of Bangladesh.
According to whois.com both the domains are registered under BNP’s Naya Paltan office differing only in the registrant’s email address.
