DHAKA, 3 April 2005 — Three leading federal lawmakers from Massachusetts sent letters to the US and Bangladesh governments, urging an independent, impartial and transparent inquiry into the Jan. 27 grenade attack that killed former Finance Minister Shah A.M.S. Kibria and four other opposition political workers.
Sens. Edward Kennedy, John Kerry and Rep. Barney Frank made the move after Nazli Kibria, a professor at Boston University and daughter of Shah Kibria, met with Congressman Barney Frank (D-Ma) recently to discuss her father’s assassination.
The three American lawmakers sent the letters to the US State Department and the Bangladesh Embassy in Washington, expressing their “strong concern over the recent wave of political terrorism in Bangladesh”, according to a press release made available in Dhaka yesterday. “As tensions rise in the run-up to an expected general election in 2006, political violence has escalated sharply in Bangladesh,” says the release quoting the letters.
They noted that at an opposition political rally in Dhaka last August, grenades were hurled at the opposition leader and former Prime Minister Hasina Wajed, in an “attempted assassination” which killed 22 people.
The violence culminated in the recent grenade blast that killed five opposition Awami League members and led to a series of nationwide strikes in February. In their letters to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Bangladesh Ambassador to the US Shamsher M. Chowdhury, the legislators urged a fully independent investigation by the FBI aimed at helping to bring the perpetrators to justice, said the press release issued by Congressman Barney Frank on Friday in Washington.
In their letters to the Bangladesh ambassador, they said, “This latest grenade attack is part of an escalating wave of political violence in recent years against moderate forces in Bangladesh, and it appears to us that the permissiveness of at least some within the Bangladesh government and the police in allowing violent groups to operate unconstrained, and the apparent failure to investigate previous similar attacks, led to a climate of impunity that encourages a continuation of such violence.”
