The six organisers of the quota reform protests who had been in the Detective Branch custody were released yesterday afternoon.
Badrul Islam, father of organiser Nahid Islam, confirmed their release to this newspaper, saying his son and the five others were freed around 1:30pm.
“I am taking my son home now … I got a call early in the morning today from the DB office, and they asked me to come and pick him up,”he said.
A photojournalist from The Daily Star, who was at the spot, saw the students coming out of the DB office on the capital’s Minto Road and get into a black microbus.
Three of the key protest organisers — Nahid Islam, Asif Mahmud and Abu Baker Majumder — were picked up from the Gonoshasthaya Nagar Hospital in Dhaka on July 26.
Nahid and Asif were undergoing medical treatment there while Baker was with them.
The next evening, DB picked up Sarjis Alam and Hasnat Abdullah.
Then on early July 28, the law enforcers picked up Nusrat Tabassum from her relative’s home in the capital’s Mirpur.
The six coordinators have since then been kept at the DB office. Detectives claimed that the students were kept in custody “for their own security”.
Earlier, in the wake of the countrywide complete shutdown by the protesters and subsequent clashes, Nahid was picked up by plainclothes men from his friend’s house in Nandipara area of the capital’s Khilgaon on July 19.
The next day, he found himself in Purbachal. He had deep bruises in different parts of his body. He then admitted himself to the hospital, from where DB picked him and the other two up again.
Two lawyers, Manjul Al-Matin and Ainunnahar Siddika, filed a writ with the High Court on Monday, seeking the release of the six coordinators and the court’s directives on not firing bullets on students across the country.
The writ was heard by a bench on Monday and Tuesday and was on the cause list for Wednesday.
A court source said the hearing could not be held on Wednesday as one of the judges, Justice SM Masud Hossain Dolon, took a two-day leave due to illness.
Source: The Daily Star
