Neighbouring countries’ help to be sought in BDR reconstruction: Sohel Taj
Courtesy New Age 6/5/09
The state minister for home affairs, Tanjim Ahmed Sohel Taj, said the government would seek the help of neighbouring countries to reorganise the Bangladesh Rifles.
He made this comment after the BDR’s chief, Major General Mainul Islam, met home minister Sahara Khatun on Tuesday.
They discussed the reorganisation of the force and the border guards’ new uniform.
‘We can take the assistance of neighbouring countries in reorganising the BDR, especially with regard to the mode of training and modernisation of the force,’ Sohel Taj told reporters, adding that the situation in BDR was now normal.
The government had earlier formed a committee, headed by Mainul Islam, to make recommendations on reorganisation of the BDR after the late February rebellion in the Pilkhana in which 75 people, most of them army officers, were killed.
The committee studied the organograms of the border guards of several countries before submitting a report to the government.
Mainul Islam at a press briefing had earlier said that the BDR’s soldiers had lost their trustworthiness because of the rebellion, and the trust could be regained only if the soldiers help investigators to ferret out the rebels.
Five soldiers were remanded in custody for five days on Tuesday in connection with the BDR carnage case.
The Criminal Investigation Department, assigned to investigate the case, produced 29 soldiers before the court of the chief metropolitan magistrate on Tuesday afternoon at the end of their seven-day remand. The CID sought a fresh seven-day remand for five of the soldiers.
After the hearing, metropolitan magistrate Faisal Atiq bin Kader granted five days’ remand to the five soldiers — deputy assistant directors Abdul Jalil and Mirza Habibur Rahman, sepoy Kajal, sepoy Abdur Rahman and sepoy Selim Reza — and sent the others to jail.
A total of 56 soldiers are now in CID’s custody. The court has so far remanded more than 400 people, most of them soldiers, for interrogation.
The CID has so far arrested 1,331 people, including some civilians, in connection with the BDR carnage case, and 59 of them have made confessional statements to the court.
The family members of BDR soldiers are still taking their belongings out of their quarters. Ten families vacated the quarters inside the Pilkhana on Tuesday, raising the total number of quarters vacated so far to 530.
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