Shahriar, a SUST student found hanging at a student mess on Thursday night, had received repeated death threats, the last known one being early this year.
“This is our last warning!” read a note sent with a burial cloth in the name of Nastik Murtad Protirodh Andolan in 2013. “Nobody can save you [the next time],” it said.
Shahriar was an activist of Gonojagoron Mancha, a youth platform that initiated never-seen-before Shahbagh Movement demanding maximum punishment for war criminals.
“During the tumultuous days of the movement, the note came as a shock,” Shahriar said in the caption of the scanned image of the note posted on Facebook.
“However, those of us who received such notes never retreated,” said his post on February 27, 2013.
According to Sylhet Gonojagoron Mancha Convener Debabrata Debu, Shahriar had been receiving death threats since 2013. The last threat came early this year for protesting the murder of secularist writer Avijit Roy in February, he added.
Shahriar had all along with Debu in organising local programmes of Gonojagoron Mancha. “He was not a person who would give up so easily,” said Debu.
Like Debu, those who were close to Shahriar didn’t take it as a suicide after he was found hanging with a waist belt from his room’s window grill.
Around 8:00pm on Thursday, police recovered the body breaking into the room on the top floor of the three-storey building on Road 4 in Surma residential area, only half-an-hour walk from his university. Roommates had called police as he was not responding to their repeated knocking.
His elder brother filed a first information report with Sylhet Kotwali Police Station, which recorded it as a case of unnatural death.
Suhel Ahmed, officer-in-charge of Sylhet Kotwali Police Station, said they right away informed the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) as there were reasons to doubt if it was a suicide at all.
A CID team visited the spot around 11:00pm on Thursday.
“From his Facebook posts, the idea we get about his current mental state makes us believe that he was not considering suicide. We believe it’s a murder,” said Paplu Bangli, president of Sylhet district Chhatra Union.
Shahriar’s laptop was open and his WhatsApp account was still logged in when he was found dead, said the left activist. Besides, if it was really a suicide, Shahriar would have prepared for it by collecting ropes.
According to noted writer Prof Zafar Iqbal, Shahriar was an energetic youth who could undertake a project like over-1.75km road painting at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology (SUST).
In March 2013, demanding death penalty for war criminals and expressing solidarity with the Shahbagh Movement, several hundred students made the painting which depicted the historic events from 1952 to 1971.
“Only the post-mortem report can say if it was a murder or suicide,” said the SUST teacher. “But those who had been threatening him over the years might be behind his death.”
Muhammad Shahriar Majumder, a final-year architecture student, was advisers of SUST Sahitya Sangsad and Cartoon Factory, and convener of SUST Sangskritik Jote, according to his Facebook profile.
His death comes at a time when law enforcers are struggling to unearth the mystery behind the brutal murders of four secularist bloggers.
Niladri Chattopadhyay Niloy, 28, who too was a Gonojagoron Mancha activist, is the fourth blogger to have been hacked to death this year by suspected Islamist militants.
At 7:27pm on Wednesday, Shahriar in his last Facebook post wrote: “At last…”, sharing the news of a suspect named Mannan Rahi confessing to the murder of Ananta Bijoy Das, one of the slain bloggers.
Source: The Daily Star
