The Pilkhana headquarters in Dhaka of the then Bangladesh Rifles turned into a realm of horror during the 33-hour nerve-wrecking mutiny which saw indiscriminate use of firearms and sharp weapons by the soldiers of the country’s border security force.
Prosecution witnesses of the carnage case concluded in November last year, comprised mostly family members of the slain army officers; those officers who survived the onslaught; and a number of soldiers of the paramilitary force.
During the trial, they gave accounts of what had happened on those two fateful days inside Pilkhana some of which the judge had cited in his judgment.
Some of the accused confessed that they had violated some female army officers, the wives of the male officers and some female domestic helps. Some of them they released and others they had killed.
Two of the rape victims, who were gang raped, also narrated their predicaments and experiences from that time. Some other survivors narrated how their family members were physically and psychologically brutalised.
According to witness accounts, Maj Gen Shakil Ahmed, the then chief of the force, was killed moments after the mutiny broke out. A group of BDR rebels rushed to his house inside Pilkhana soon after. Sensing danger, Skhakil’s wife Naznin Ahmed took refuge in the kitchen but to no avail as the soldiers tracked her down, dragged her out, tortured and eventually shot her to death.
A BDR soldier told this to the court in his confessional statement given under section 164 of the penal code.
Some rogue soldiers violated a 12-year-old domestic help of an army officer and shot her dead.
The mutineers ransacked the houses and looted belongings of many other army officers.
Many army officers’ wives and children, who were spared death, were dealt with abusive words and merciless beating.
“Two soldiers broke into our house. They dragged me out of the bedroom and kicked my nine-year-old child. He fell on the staircase and dropped to the ground floor,” a victim’s wife told the court.
After looting ornaments from the cabinet, the BDR men left and she, along with her son, rushed to one of the gates of the headquarters to escape, she narrated.
“They [BDR men] stopped us at the gate, beat me up with rifles and rammed me with boots. Half an hour later, we were confined to the Quarter Guard where many other families were kept,” she recounted.
Officers hunted and killed Immediately after the mutiny started, some army officials took shelter in the toilet of the Darbal Hall. At one stage, they broke open a window and slid to a shade behind the hall. The killers hunted them down and killed them by brushfire.
These brutal murders came out in confessional statements given by the accused and the witness depositions.
What the court said “They ripped the skin off and cut limbs from the dead bodies of some officers using knives and other sharp tools. The faces of the dead bodies were smashed beyond recognition... [mutineers] killed some officers by shoving rifle barrels and firing right into their mouths. The faces of some officers, who were already dead by then, were burnt with acid.” That was how the trial court described the brutality witnessed by the Pilkhana headquarters of the then BDR, now BGB.
