Assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman

The first president of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and most of his family were killed during the early hours of 15 August 1975 by a group of young Bangladesh Army personnel who invaded his Dhanmondi 32 residence as part of a coup d'état.[1] Minister of Commerce Khondaker Mostaq Ahmad immediately took control of the government and proclaimed himself president. The assassination marked the first direct military intervention in Bangladesh's civilian administration-centric politics. August 15 is National Mourning Day, an official national holiday.

Quotes

• The man installed as Bangladesh’s president by the young officers who had slain Rahman was Khondakar Mustaque, generally identified as the leader of the right-wing element within the Awami League. He was at pains to say that the coup had come to him as a complete surprise, and that the young majors who had led it—Major Farooq, Major Rashid and four others, at the head of a detachment numbering just three hundred men—had “acted on their own.” He added that he had never met the mutinous officers before.... The cover story (one might term it the coincidence version) leaks at every joint and comes apart at the most cursory inspection.
  • Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2002)

• Only a reopened congressional inquiry with subpoena power could determine whether there was any direct connection, apart from the self-evident ones of consistent statecraft attested by recurring reliable testimony, between the secret genocidal diplomacy of 1971 and the secret destabilizing diplomacy of 1975. The task of disproving such a connection, meanwhile, would appear to rest on those who believe that everything is an accident.
  • Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2002)