India continues claiming that some of the BSF members who died during the skirmish with BDR at Boraibari border village on April 18 were lynched, although an immediate post-mortem report conducted at a Bangladeshi hospital stated that "all the BSF personnel died of bullet injuries".
While submitting the report of the post-mortem, done at Mymensingh Medical College Hospital, the BDR also asked the BSF to do another post-mortem or invite foreign observers if the latter disagreed with the report. But, the BSF did not agree to the suggestion at the time.
However, the Indian authorities recently did another post-mortem on the bodies of BSF members and the post-mortem report said that "eleven of the 16 bodies had marks of bullet injuries", according to a Times of India report published yesterday.
Refuting India's allegation that five BSF men were lynched, Dhaka had already made it clear that the Indian border troops were killed in the battle that erupted when they tried to assault a BDR outpost.
The Times of India investigative report quoted the BDR officials at Boraibari as saying that the BSF men were killed in combat by light machine guns while referring to New Delhi's version that the BSF soldiers were "dragged" into Bangladeshi territory and then "tortured and killed".
Providing details of the misadventure of the Indian border guards, a BDR soldier described to the daily the BSF assault as "a most goofy
activity" because they surrounded the BDR post and tried to attack from 50 to 75 yards.
"An assault from all sides means you're firing on your own men," the soldier was quoted as saying. "And to attack a post which has an LMG from so close is really foolish. Had our post simply been openly surrounded by a larger BSF force, we would have vacated peacefully", he explained, adding that it would have been "a good tit-for-tat" for the BDR moving into Padua. "But the BSF opened fire. Perhaps they thought our LMG was being readied."
"Forget about torture", another BDR personnel told the newspaper, "we are not even mentally prepared to fight Indian soldiers. If a Pakistani comes, we can do anything to throw him out. But, we don't think of India that way. We are independent because of India."
Asked about the photograph of a dead BSF man being carried on a bamboo pole, the villagers
explained to the Indian daily that they had to recover the bodies from the paddy fields while heavy shooting was going on.
"Every time we went near the bodies, the BSF would fire," claimed a local. "So, we crawled up to each body, tied its ankles together and slowly dragged it out. Even one BDR body was recovered that way."
Villagers said that once out of firing range, they tied the body to a pole "to cover the three kilometre to Boraibari more easily."
Meanwhile, India's High Commissioner in Dhaka Manilal Tripathi on Tuesday handed over to Foreign Minister Abdus Samad Azad documents detailing concerns about the alleged torture and slaying of the Indian border security forces, according to the Times of India.
The documents also called for a prompt probe into the deaths of the BSF men, which the government had already ordered for.
But, the foreign minister at a
press briefing at his office following his meeting with the Indian envoy on Tuesday said that the two sides had only expressed their concern to each other over the border incident.
The Bangladesh government strongly defended the BDR action as an act of self-defence and categorically said the Indian border guards had intruded into Boraibari village of Bangladesh on April 18.
Meanwhile, the BDR lodged a complaint with Roumari police on Wednesday against the killing of three of its members in the April 18 clash at Boraibari, and the intrusion and attack by the BSF into Bangladesh territory as well.
The two countries have wrangled over the 4,000-km border since Bangladesh earned independence in 1971. The border is not clearly demarcated, and there are many enclaves and disputed frontier villages, which often lead to skirmishes between security forces and citizens of both countries.