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AUGUST 21 GRENADE ATTACK

Hopes die with son's death

Sohrab Hossain, from Patuakhali
With the loss of their only son and the eldest child, Mamun, to the August 21 grenade carnage last year, the Mridhas of Alipura village also have lost all their future hopes.
Gone with the winds was their zeal to live, to eke out a living. Motaleb Mridha, a landless farmer turned sawmill worker, and his wife Morsheda are now too frustrated to fight through any longer the drudgeries of poverty to ensure a better life for their remaining children.
Mamun Mridha, a first-year higher secondary school student of Kabi Nazrul Islam Government College, was one of the 22 people killed in the August 21 grenade attack on an Awami League rally that also injured over 100 others in 2004. He lived with his father at Nayabazar in Old Dhaka, where Motaleb worked at a sawmill.
"I forbade him not to join any procession or meeting of any political party, but he didn't listen to me," grieved Morsheda, sitting beside her husband at their Alipura home in Dasmina upazila, some 60km off Patuakhali district town.
On that fatal day, immediately after the blasts, rescuers found him leaning against a closed shutter of a shop on Bangabandhu Avenue. Shrapnel smashed both his legs. Four grenade splinters pierced through his ribs, one through his right chin and some might have hit his brain, recalled Motaleb, who had rushed to the spot hearing the news.
He said, "As I hurried with him towards Dhaka Medical College and Hospital, I thought my son was unconscious. But at the hospital doctors declared him dead."
As a student, Mamun was quite promising. He passed the secondary school certificate examinations in first division from the local BB Roy High School in 2003. He wanted to be an army officer, recalled Morsheda, with tears rolling down her pale cheeks.
"We have no land except this house on only a 3-katha plot. So, we had to meet the expenses for his schooling with the help of our close relatives," Motaleb said, adding Mamun also helped bearing the expenses by working as a private tutor. They hoped one day Mamun would take responsibility of his four sisters, when eventually he starts earning.
Motaleb, the only breadwinner of the family, now cannot labour as hard as he could one year ago. He can hardly earn Tk 2,400 a month. Of their four daughters -- Mahmuda, 16, Jhumur, 14, Runa, 12, and Tuli, 10 -- Jhumur and Runa had to end education abruptly, as Motaleb could no longer support the expenses.
"Out of the Tk 1 lakh compensation money we received from Awami League, we have already spent Tk 40,000 for Mamun's Chehlam and my eldest daughter's marriage. The government has not provided us with any aid," Motaleb said.
While Morsheda demanded, "I want to know who killed my son and why," Mahmuda echoed her mother, "Yes, we want to know who the killers are. Their trials may come later."
"Even if Awami League is responsible, as is claimed by the government, we want to know the names of the masterminds behind the cowardly mayhem," she added.
But, Motaleb has strong doubts whether "This government will properly investigate the grisly crime," as "All they have been doing in the names of probe and trial are nothing but a farce."