Thirteen days before Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s house located in Dhaka’s Dhanmondi neighbourhood was demolished by a huge throng of Hizbut Tehrir and Jamaat-e-Islami supporters, four students’ coordinators flew to Dubai mostly likely to meet with their Pakistani handlers, information available with Northeast News reveals.
The students’ coordinators, identified as Mahfuz Alam Bhuiyan, Asif Mahmud Shojib Bhuiyan, Moajjam Hossain and Abdul Aahad, took Biman Bangladesh Airlines flight number BG-147 on January 23, a day after Chief Advisor Mohammad Yunus left for Switzerland to attend the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, took seats just behind business class.
While Mahfuz Alam was appointed as a full-fledged advisor to the Yunus administration on November 10, 2024, after serving as a special assistant to the head of the interim government for three months, Asif Mahmud is also an advisor in charge of the Youth and Sports ministry.
Documents show that while Alam and Aahad were in seats 2A and 2C, respectively, the other two occupied seats 1A and 1C. Three other Bangladeshi businessmen, as yet unidentified, accompanied the four students’ coordinators who were at the forefront of the conspiracy to eject and unseat the then Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina from power on August 5, 2024.
Bangladeshi security service sources revealed that the destination of the students’ coordinators was Dubai where they were suspected to have met their Pakistani handlers. Most intriguingly, Mahfuz Alam returned to Dhaka on August 24 but the other three stayed back for “prolonged confabulations” with Pakistani officials.
It is not known which hotel the four students’ coordinators put up in during their short stay in Dubai where some of them had met Pakistan Army officials in the months leading up to the August 5, 2024 movement. Northeast News had earlier reported several clandestine meetings that groups of students’ coordinators held with Pakistani security officials as also some American individuals between April 2023 and September 2024.
Bangladeshi security sources suspect that the four students’ coordinators “took specific directives and instructions” from their Pakistani handlers, which “may have been aimed at the violent strike against Sheikh Mujib’s Dhanmondi house” on February 5 this year.
That the militant action by the ‘students’ was not restricted to specifically target properties belonging to the ‘Sheikh family’ on February 5 is clear from the attacks carried out on properties belonging to other Awami League leaders, including Amir Hossain ‘Amu’, Toffail Ahmed and Obaidul Quader, among others, across Bangladesh on February 6.
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“These targeted attacks against Awami League leaders and the consequent social tension will only push Bangladesh towards further instability and chaos at a time when the Mohammad Yunus administration must concentrate on governance and political equilibrium,” said Dhaka-based political analyst Nazmul Ahsan Kalimullah.
