Habibur Mondal

Security was extremely tight on 20 August 2000 in the 400-year-old capital city of Dhaka, Bangladesh, with visits from two foreign leaders: Palestine’s Yasser Arafat and Japanese Premier Yoshiro Mori. But even under this atmosphere of surveillance, alleged contract killer Kala Jahangir was reportedly able to shoot his target, Habibur Rahman Mondal, an advocate and local leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

Forty-four-year-old Mondal and his clerk, Arshad, were travelling to court by motorbike that morning when they came under attack by unidentified gunmen. Mondal was shot in the head and killed, but Arshad, who received a perforating bullet wound, managed to survive. It’s been 19 years since then and Arshad is still in hiding.

From a place of safety, a hideout at night, Arshad narrated how Mondal’s murder continues to haunt him and how it has had a devastating impact on Dhaka society at large. Despite concerns for his safety, Arshad testified as the main eyewitness in the 2003 murder trial, when the court handed death sentences to Jahangir and co-accused Saidur Rahman Shahid (alias Shahid Commissioner), leader of the Bangladeshi extremist group Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB).

Animosity had first ignited between Mondal and Shahid when the latter lost a municipal post to Mondal in Sutrapur. Shahid’s bitterness then turned murderous when Mondal successfully filed a naraji (petition of disagreement; literally ‘I don’t accept’) in court to challenge a report allegedly fabricated by the police that indemnified Shahid of the killing of two of Mondal’s men in 1999.

From 1991 until his death, Mondal had filed numerous general diaries (reports) claiming that he would eventually be killed by Shahid. And in 1996, when the Bangladesh Awami League (BAL) came to power after 21 years, Mondal had narrowly managed to escape bombs hurled at his residence. All of which gave credence to the BNP’s conviction that his murder was part of a ‘government-led political vendetta’.

A close scrutiny of developments in the Mondal murder case, spanning two decades, exposes a criminal web within Bangladesh politics and governance that continues to threaten citizens’ faith in the state machinery. Bangladesh officially being a democratic republic, its legal system is supposed to ensure justice, prevent corruption in the court system and uphold the basic essence of the rule of law. But all of this is complicated by the country’s politics being duopolistic, made up of the pro-centre-left ruling BAL and its rival, the pro-centre-right BNP.

Mondal’s assassination took place at the height of the BNP’s electoral campaign and was summarily exploited for the purpose of reinstating the party to power in 2001. Led by Begum Khaleda Zia, who is currently in prison on corruption charges, the BNP squarely blamed the then-ruling BAL for the murder, even though Shahid was not himself a member of the BAL. Shahid was always primarily associated with the Jatiya Party (JP), politically allied with the BAL since 1996.

With the victory of BNP in the October 2001 election, the Mondal murder case became a priority once again and the police summarily issued a charge sheet listing 18 suspects. In May 2003, a speedy trial tribunal handed the death penalty to Shahid and Kala Jahangir, and sentenced five others to life imprisonment.

However, in 2008, the high court overruled Shahid’s sentence on the grounds that the ‘prosecution failed to prove the charge of criminal conspiracy’. A defence team of senior lawyers, one of whom was later appointed to a ministerial position, were seen playing for key suspects.

The BNP lost interest in the matter, allegedly because the case would not grant them useful political exposure any more. Notably, the party leader, Zia, who had organized the movements demanding the immediate arrest of Shahid in 2000, had switched sides and led the defence team responsible for freeing Shahid in 2008. She even went to the highest court to free the five other convicts and succeeded.