Dhaka: Bangladesh interim government chief Muhammad Yunus’ office on Tuesday said the extradition of deposed prime minister Sheikh Hasina from India was Dhaka’s top priority. “This is the government’s top priority,” Chief Adviser Yunus’ press secretary Shafiqul Alam said in a media briefing, adding that Dhaka would continue its efforts to extradite Hasina to hold her trial in person.
He said it was up to the people and political parties of Bangladesh to decide if her “fascist” Awami League would be able to carry on politics but those allegedly involved in killings, enforced disappearances and other wrongdoings must be brought to justice.
The spokesman said the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights’ (OHCHR) fact finding report, released last week, revealed that Hasina committed crimes against humanity during her tenure.
“After the report of the UN and some reports of rights groups were published, pressure has been mounted (on India to return Hasina to Bangladesh),” the state-run Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS) quoted him as saying.
Alam said a survey by an Indian media group showed that 55 per cent Indians wanted her repatriation while a certain per cent want to send her to another country and only 16-17 per cent wanted her stay in India.
Bangladesh’s Foreign Office earlier said they sent a diplomatic note seeking her repatriation and New Delhi acknowledged its receipt without any elaboration Hasina secretly fled the country for India when her nearly 16-year-long Awami League regime was toppled in a student-led mass uprising on August 5, 2024.
She has been accused of a series of charges like commission of crimes against humanity, mass murders and enforced disappearances by the subsequent interim administration along with many of her senior colleagues in the cabinet and party. Most of these leaders and officials are now in jail to face trial or on the run at home and abroad.
Alam’s comments came a day after Hasina accused Yunus of turning Bangladesh into a “terrorist” hub, exposing it to a state of lawlessness in a virtual conversation with some of the widows and children of policemen killed during the last year’s unrest. Hasina vowed to return home and “avenge the deaths of our policemen” and added that she too narrowly escaped death when her government was toppled by the grace of God “who definitely kept me alive to do something good”.
The deposed premier earlier on February 5 virtually addressed a meeting of now disbanded Chhatra League, her party’s student wing, when her ancestral house and residence of Bangladesh’s founding father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was demolished by a mob with a preannounced declaration as the news of her scheduled meeting broke.
The mob used excavators to level the 32 Dhanmondi house, which was memorial museum named after the assassinated leader who was killed along with most of his family members in a coup by a group of relatively junior military officers on August 15, 1975.
The mobs also launched a near simultaneous attack on Awami League leaders’ houses and establishments across the country that continued for the subsequent three days. Yunus himself in a media interview earlier asked New Delhi to debar Hasina from speaking out, saying her comments enraged people in Bangladesh.
