Additional Inspector General of Police Shahidul Haque holds a report of the rights body Odhikar while speaking at a press conference at the Police Headquarters in the capital on Thursday.
Police will not take any action against rights body Odhikar as an organisation for publishing “a distorted report and photoshopped images” on the May 5 police action on a Hefajat-e Islam rally.
“It is up to the NGO Affairs Bureau whether it would take any step,” Shahidul Haque, additional inspector general of police, said at a press conference at the Police Headquarters in the capital Thursday.
Haque almost echoed the same findings about the Odhikar report as briefed by Monirul Islam, joint commissioner of Detective Branch of police, at a conference on Wednesday.
According to the law enforcers, 11 people were killed in clashes between police and Hefajat activists in the capital on May 5. Two more injured in the clashes died later in the hospital.
Thirteen other people died in different places across the country in different incidents, including road accidents. But the Odhikar report claimed they all died in the midnight police operation, said police.
After cross-checking the Odhikar list, police found that 18 people never existed at the given addresses, five people were named twice, four are still alive and six died in Narayanganj and Hathazari violence and one of heart attack.
Following Odhikar’s report, the government sought from it the list of 61 dead persons, which the organisation refused to provide on the ground of protecting the families of the victims. Odhikar instead gave it a list of those who had been injured.
The rights organisation later claimed to have given the list to some international human rights organisations and local Ain O Salish Kendra (ASK). But ASK says it has not received any such list.
The organisation’s secretary Adilur Rahman Khan was arrested on August 10 shortly after filing of a general diary with Gulshan Police Station for publishing a “false report” on the Hefajat crackdown.
Police said they found a list of 61 people in Odhikar’s computers that they seized raiding the organisation’s office.
After investigation, detectives Wednesday accused the Odhikar secretary Adilur and Director SM Nasiruddin Elan of stoking people’s religious sentiments by publishing “a distorted report and photoshopped images” on the May 5 police action.
Source; The Daily Star