PW-6 Shahjahan Ali had been tortured brutally at the behest of accused Matiur Rahman Nizami after he was captured in a front fight with Pakistan occupation army at Dhulauri in Sathia of Pabna on November 28, 1971.
During the cross-examination by the defence counsel, Shahjahan said he could not remember the names of his seven martyred comrades-in-arms captured along with him. “They were killed in bayonet charge at the behest of Matiur Rahman Nizami, chief of Al Badr in 1971.”
Replying to a defence question, Shahjahan, who gets Tk 10,000 in allowance per month from the public exchequer as a war-wounded freedom fighter, told the tribunal that sometimes he gets confused as he had suffered brain hemorrhage twice.
Asked whether Sattar Razakar who at the behest of Nizami had taken him along with his seven freedom fighter friends to a riverbank for annihilation, was a major, the PW said local people used to call him major. “I don’t know that there is a rank like major in the army.”
The PW declined the defence suggestion that he had given the evidence against Nizami as tutored by the prosecution.
With detained Matiur Rahman Nizami, the incumbent ameer of Jamaat-e-Islami, in the dock, defence counsel Mizanul Islam cross-examined the PW.
The Jamaat chief, being tried on charges of involvement in murders and torture of unarmed people along with hatching conspiracy, planning, incitement and complicity to commit genocide and crimes against humanity during the 1971 Liberation War in collaboration with the Pakistan occupation army.
Also the president of Islami Chhatra Sangha (ICS), the student wing of Jamaat-e-Islami in 1971, Nizami faces 16 counts of charges based on 16 separate incidents of crimes against humanity, in which at least 600 unarmed people were killed and 31 women raped during the Liberation War.
The tribunal adjourned the trial proceedings for May 12.
