Plot to kill Joy: Myth and the reality

M. Shahidul Islam

The false crying of wolf can be of deadly consequence when the real wolf hits home, so goes a classical Bengali proverb. On the other hand, the power of power politics can be intrusive, onerous and devastating for the societies affected by it if the media fails to mirror the truth.

In recent history, autocratic power wielding had resulted in the overthrow of the mighty Shah of Iran in 1979 by a handful of military academy cadets while the despotic Carlos regime of Cuba was dislodged by about a dozen retired army officers in 1952 in about 77 minutes time.

Plot to kill Joy
Despotism of all hues being, by necessity, too obsessive about establishing filial rules by bludgeoning into atoms everything truthful, the consequences turn chaotic in the short run and devastating in the long run. The Iranian chaos was followed by an Islamic revolution in weeks time while revolution engulfed Cuba too in less than a decade since the despotic Batista’s resumption of power in 1952.
Bangladesh has been teeming for decades under the prospect of unremitting filial rules as the two major political parties, the BNP and AL, resorted to grooming hereditary leadership to entrench the tentacles of filial grip in national politics and power. The trend is getting deadlier amidst incessant chaos, killing and lawlessness gripping the nation.
A recent debate at Bangladesh Parliament and the news in a section of the media that a US court had prosecuted and convicted a BNP-linked accused for his attempt to kill Sajib Wazed Joy, son of Bangladesh’s incumbent PM, is nothing but a lie that is being touted as a plot to assassinate the heir apparent of the Bangladesh PM. Like the wolf crying syndrome, a coterie is deliberately misleading people to shed propagandistic highlights on Joy so that he could be catapulted into the public arena as a victim of conspiracy.

Factual contents
The Holiday had investigated the veracity of the published reports and the debate at the Bangladesh parliament and compared them with what the case in the USA was about. The source of the outcry, a judgment on March 4 by a US District Judge, Vincent Briccetti, of Southern New York district, has been grossly misrepresented by the Bangladesh media and the ruling party lawmakers to distort facts and divert the issue toward a wholly different direction to derive undue political advantage, as can be seen from the narrative below.
This scribe had examined the pertinent legal documents about the case which is a two-part litigation; one part involving indictable offenses by an FBI agent who had promised a third party to disclose some classified documents from the FBI investigation file while the other part deals with the crimes of two alleged accused who conspired to approach the alleged FBI agent for this illicit activity.
The FBI matters being classified, the narrative of the case does not deal, per se, exhaustively about what particular documents the alleged FBI special agent, Robert Lustyik, promised to divulge to the third party in lieu of bribe. Nor there is evidence to suggest that material offering of bribe occurred.
Court documents reveal Lustyik has been indicted on five counts of offenses. They are: Conspiracy to engage in a bribery scheme; soliciting bribes by a public official; conspiracy to defraud US citizens and the FBI; theft of government property; and, unauthorized disclosure of a suspicious activity report. Lustyik pleaded guilty to the charges on December 23, 2014 and a verdict on the case is due on April 30. This is the second part of the case.

Corruption investigation
The cases relate to corruptions by US citizens and public officials and the convicted accused in the already disposed case are: Rizve Ahmed alias Caesar of Connecticut and Johannes Thaler of New Fairfield. They both were sentenced to prison for 42 months and 30 months, respectively, for their roles in the alleged bribery scheme. The indictment accused Ahmed of using Thaler, who is a friend of the alleged FBI agent Lustyik, to get the copy of the ‘suspicious report’ from the FBI by bribing the Federal Agent.
It’s unfortunate that before any verdict has been rendered on the second and the most important part of the case, the outcry within and outside Bangladesh began to ricochet like rock n roll buzzing. Not only the alleged FBI agent is yet to be sentenced with any punishment, the verdict rendered on March 4 against the two other accused relates only to their undue approach to the alleged FBI agent to get a copy of a ‘suspicious activity report.’
The main reason of the unwarranted outcry is to dwarf the main thrust of the cases under a heap of propaganda. The Holiday has confirmed that the concerned FBI report is about the investigation within the USA of the alleged international corruption of a US citizen of high-profiled Bangladeshi roots.

Phantom BNP nexus
It’s also evident that Sajib Wazed Joy volunteered to cash on the verdict by claiming in his facebook status on March 9 that he had made a statement to the court as the victim of the scheme and that accused Rizve Ahmed is the son of Mohammed Ullah Mamun, Vice President of BNP’s cultural chapter, JSS. The case documents, however, do not refer to any such pedigree-relating-nexus.
What the case narrative contains, however, is that the initiator of the scheme, Ahmed, did make a move through Thaler to obtain the classified FBI report, and, being frustrated at one point, decided to use other source to get the report. It was revealed in the court that this decision of Ahmed made Lustyik angry.
One of the exhibits reads: In an email dispatch to Thaler, Lustyik retorted: “Tell (Ahmed), I’ve got (the victim’s) number and I’m pissed….I will put a wire on n get (Ahmed and his associates) to admit they want (a Bangladeshi political figure) offed n we sell it to (the victim). …..So bottom line, I need ten gs asap. We gotta squeeze c.”
The above mail indicates Lustyik was trying to blackmail Ahmed due to his decision to use different source to get the desired investigation report about a US citizen of Bangladeshi descent. Besides, Lustyik demanded money and made a threat in the email by concocting an allegation that someone was trying to ‘kill a Bangladeshi politician” about which he threatened to extract a confession from Ahmed and sell it to the victim (Bangladeshi politician).

Concocted death threat
This is sheer blackmail by a disgruntled FBI agent and it proves nothing about the existence of a scheme to kill Mr. Joy or anyone else, especially when the indictment centers on the attempt to obtain a classified document by bribing a public official and has no mention of any attempt to kidnap or kill a Bangladeshi politician by anyone.
It’s more curious that Mr. Joy admits in his facebook status of March 9 that he had submitted a statement to the court as the victim of the scheme on March 4 in which he had accused the BNP of attempting to kidnap and kill him in the USA.
The case itself being about an attempt by an individual to obtain a classified FBI investigation report through bribery, where did Mr. Joy find the words BNP, kidnapping, killing and the name Joy remains a mystery.
Here again, the wolf syndrome is on the play. Or, another Bengali proverb may be more accurate: “Who’s is in the temple? I don’t eat banana,” is the response from within.
The concerned FBI investigation report Mr. Ahmed sought to obtain by bribing an FBI agent is a classified document about which not much is known. Our investigation, however, reveal that the judicial probing itself stemmed primarily from an allegations against the US energy giant Chevron which is reported to have bribed some high profiled political personalities of Bangladesh in 2009 to get $52.7 million deal to install a gas compressor station in Bangladesh under the Production Sharing Contract (PSC).

What the report is about?
Amidst a number of other allegations that followed this revelation, an FBI investigation zeroed in on the activities of a high profiled US citizen of Bangladeshi descent. And, following a string of other media exposures about the Chevron and other scams, energy advisor Dr. Tawfiq-e-Elahi Chowdhury jetted to the USA in late December 2009 and met concerned officials of the Chevron and the concerned high-profiled Bangladeshi politician to manage the crisis.
Meanwhile, alerted by a slew of other media exposures, the FBI is learnt to have finessed the alleged kickback allegation of the concerned US companies and citizens while the case was further investigated by the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General until Trial Attorney Emily Rae Woods of the Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section began to prosecute the accused.
A reliable source said the classified investigation report about a Bangladeshi politician “contained other sensitive matters relating to about $300 m suspicious transactions under a number of US companies linked to a single individual.”
It’s evident from the case document that: no material transaction of bribing occurred but the intent to give and take bribe was treated as offense; that the case was about the attempt of an individual to obtain classified document by bribing a public official; and that, there was no indication of any plot to kidnap or kill anybody and the nomenclatures such as Sajib Wazed Joy, or the BNP are all but non-existent in the case documents and case proceedings.
May be our media and the make-believe parliament would wake up to the reality and verify facts before dealing with what is quintessentially a fiction by design and substance.

Source: Weekly Holiday