Following a recent controversy over BNP founder Ziaur Rahman’s presidency, the party said http://bnpbd.org is its official website and that it is currently offline.
The party also declined to accept the http://bangladeshnationalistparty-bnp as its official website.
On March 26 and 27 BNP Vice-Chairperson Tarique Rahman and Chairperson Khaleda Zia claimed Ziaur Rahman was the first president of Bangladesh.
Subsequently the media reports pointed out that their claim was contradictory to the BNP official website where Zia was mentioned as the seventh president.
On March 30, BNP Assistant Office Secretary Abdul Latif Jony claimed that BNP’s official website is www.bnpbd.org. Jony came up with the explanation while talking to a Bangladeshi online newspaper.
Noting that BNP Vice-Chairperson Tarique was responsible for the bnpbd.org website, Jony said: “It has not been active since his arrest after the 1/11 take over. The website has remained closed for over a month for reconstruction.”
However, a tech-procedural investigation of the Dhaka Tribune has found that BNP’s claim that its official website is not bangladeshnationalistparty-bnp.org is untrue.
Though BNP claims the bnpbd.org to be its official website, which they say is now under construction, it was set up to redirect viewers to the bangladeshnationalistparty-bnp.org from January 2012.
The machine proves that the party’s other website www.bnpbd.org was redirected to the website www.bangladeshnationalistparty-bnp.org.
The Dhaka Tribune debunked the party’s claims by means of the Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web created by the Internet Archive, a non-profit organisation, located in San Francisco, California in the United States.
Bnpbd.org redirected
We ran a search for the http://bnpbd.org on the search bar on the Wayback machine here.
It was found that the Wayback machine preserved web pages of the bnpbd.org from August 9, 2001 to March 8, 2014. In the early years, the Wayback machine saved pages from bnpbd.org.
However, contrary to BNP leader Jony’s claim the machine did save some pages when it was supposed to be offline.
Clicking on ‘History’ under the BNP tab of the saved page a reader can reach the page where Ziaur Rahman is mentioned as the seventh president of Bangladesh.
According to whois.com both the domains are registered under BNP’s Naya Paltan office differing only in the registrant’s email address.