A few days after Sheikh Hasina resigned as Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Islamists disguised as “anti-government” activists attacked the residence of Tureen Afroz.
She is the former chief prosecutor of the Sheikh Hasina-led Awami League government before the International Criminal Tribunal for Bangladesh (ICT-B) and oversaw the prosecution of several Razakars for their crimes against humanity during the 1971 War of Independence.
An Islamist mob reportedly laid siege to her house, violently cutting off her hair and injuring her legs during the targeted attack. Meanwhile, two disturbing images allegedly belonging to the victim have surfaced on social media.
While one picture shows Afroz with a shaved head, the other shows black marks on her legs. OpIndia, however, could not independently verify the authenticity of the said pictures. According to reports, there have been two attacks on the former ICT prosecutor so far.
On Tuesday (6 August), Tureen Afroz told Independent Television: “They asked: ‘Why don’t you wear a hijab? Your mother left the country. Why didn’t you?’ They kept hitting me on the legs with a pencil. I am diabetic.”
She added: “My 16-year-old daughter was with me. I was terrified. If they had hurt her or raped her, what would I have done as a mother?”
The former ICT-B prosecutor said the mob intimidated her into posting her statement on Facebook and asked her to publicly discredit the verdict of the tribunal that executed several Razakars for their complicity in crimes against humanity.
“The tribunal’s verdict was wrong. What I did was wrong. All the verdicts of the International Criminal Court were wrong,” the attackers wanted the victim to say. She was not allowed to leave her house until Wednesday (August 7).
Although she feared for her safety, Tureen Afroz told Independent Television that she would not go anywhere and would instead stay in Bangladesh.
On Thursday (8 August) she posted on Facebook: “Help. Uttara residential area has been attacked. Please help.”
It is worth mentioning that Tureen Afroz openly campaigned for Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League government in 2023.
Given the overwhelming number of radical members of the BNP and Jamaat-e-Islami participating in the “anti-government protests”, it was to be expected that Tureen Afroz would sooner or later be targeted for her role in persecuting the Razakars in the Bangladesh War of 1971.
For the unaware, the International Criminal Court of Bangladesh (ICT) was set up in 2009 to investigate atrocities committed by the Pakistani army and its supporters – the Razakars, Al-Badr and Al-Shams.
Tureen Afroz was the chief prosecutor of ICT Bangladesh until she was summarily dismissed from her post in 2019 over a “secret meeting” with a war crimes defendant named Md Oahidul Haque.
