The BUET has had an almost impeccable record in campus peace and academic continuity among the institutions of high learning in the country. But it seems to be in the bad way now having lost its immunity to violence and murderous assault. On Saturday morning Ahmed Ullah, a final year civil engineering stuaent and general secretary of the Samajtantrik Chhatra Front (SCF), the apple of eye to his parents, was viciously gunned down near the teachers' residential enclave by two unidentified young men. The assailants are suspected to be outsiders, hired or otherwise assigned to kill, by someone who ap-garently bore personal grudge against Ahmed Ul-

Whether the gruesome murder was the result of political or personal vendetta will hopefully come to light in due course but suffice it to say at this stage that if it were not for an abetment from inside those two youngmen couldn't have dared enter the campus and have breakfast with the would-be victim minutes before he was led out towards Bakshibazar for the killing, in a perfect sequence-by-sequence unfolding of a plot. This goes to underscore the growing sense of insecurity in all kinds of academic campuses today. That the BUET waxed complacent on this score despite being well aware of security breaches occurring in other academic institutions from time to time can not be in doubt. Why were the outsiders not screened at the gate. They could be caught red-handed with their gun or the very fact that vigil was being kept would have warded them off. Let this be a routine precaution from now on;

Sine die closures of institutions in the wake of a backlash of any dastardly incident hardly help matters; they can even put a sop on the investigations. The police better not fail to ferret out the culprits.