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In anguish, Matin responded, “I don’t regret losing my job. They have killed my son -- there is little left for me to live for.”

Matin said after Shahriar was shot on July 18, 2024, in Mirpur-10, he was taken to two local hospitals before being transferred to Dhaka Medical College Hospital, where doctors said a bullet had entered through his forehead above the eye and could not be operated on.

“I found my son in the ICU, fighting for his life,” he said. Despite desperate pleas to move him elsewhere for better treatment, Shahriar had to remain at DMCH and was declared dead at 2:06pm on July 20.

Matin further described the ordeal that followed. Mirpur police refused to file a general diary, citing jurisdictional doubts. He eventually filed one at Shahbagh Police Station, completed the post-mortem and inquest procedures, and received his son’s body at 8:00pm on July 21.

He alleged that local Awami League leaders and administrative figures pressured him not to take the body home. “When I refused, I was told to bury him under the cover of darkness,” he said. The burial took place the next morning in their village in Mymensingh after a journey marked by repeated obstructions.

The tribunal also recorded testimony from Sumi Akter, 38, whose husband Akteruzzaman Naim, a small clothing trader, left home on July 28 to join protests but never returned.

“In the evening, I received a call from an unknown number telling me to go to DMCH as my husband had met with an accident,” she said. She, along with family members, reached there, and hospital staff brought out his body on a trolley.

“They told me he had been shot in the head,” she said, her voice breaking. He was later buried in their village home in Patuakhali.

Both witnesses alleged the killings were part of a broader, coordinated crackdown, and claimed former prime minister Sheikh Hasina, her adviser Salman F Rahman, and then law minister Anisul Huq were linked to decisions that led to the lethal suppression of protesters under curfew.

Both of them demanded justice.