Rights body Odhikar could not hold its scheduled programme yesterday to observe International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances as the National Press Club authorities cancelled their decision to host the programme.
Odhikar initiated the event together with Asian legal Research Centre, Asian Federation of Human Rights and Asian Federation against Involuntary Disappearance(AFAD). Family members of at least 24 disappeared persons were supposed to share their experiences at the programme.
“On Saturday afternoon, an office staff of the National Press Club called our office and said that the programme had been cancelled. Then I called Kamrul Islam Chowdhury, the secretary of newly-formed Ad-hoc committee. He informed me that they would arrange a programme at the venue at the same time,” Odhikar President Prof CR Abrar told the Dhaka Tribune yesterday.
Press Club President Shafiqur Rahman acknowledged the matter while talking to the BBC.
Prof Abrar also alleged that some of the victims’ families were asked by unknown people, over the phone on Saturday noon, not to take part in the event.
He claimed that two persons with walkie talkie had gone to Odhikar Secretary Adilur Rahman’s residence on Saturday and enquired about him.
A former deputy attorney general during the BNP-Jamaat government, Adilur is currently on bail in a case filed for giving distorted information about the death toll in police action on Hefazat-e-Islam’s Motijheel rally on May 5, 2013.
In early August, the Police Headquarters in a statement said that Odhikar was spreading subversive propaganda by claiming that the law enforcers had been involved in extrajudicial killings.
The statement came after Odhikar claimed that seven people had been killed extra-judicially in the name of “crossfire, encounters, gunfights” of the law enforcers in July. Of them, five were killed by elite force Rapid Action Battalion while the two others by the police.