THE IMPACT of last week’s insurrection by Bangladesh’s border guards is beginning to unfold following the discovery of several graves containing the bodies of scores of army officers among the 140 killed in the mutiny.
The army uncovered the graves at the weekend as they continued the search for dozens of missing officers. It quelled last Wednesday’s uprising by the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) over pay and conditions by deploying tanks and engaging the mutineers in firefights at their headquarters in the capital Dhaka and other bases countrywide.
Many of the bodies of the 63 officers killed, including BDR commander Major Gen Shakil Ahmed, were dumped in sewers and canals or were partially burnt.
Soldiers and firefighters were looking for patches of freshly dug earth and the smell of corpses in the rose and vegetable gardens of the BDR barracks in Dhaka, and in the small zoo it houses.
Naval divers with ropes tied around their waists were climbing down sewers and into canals, where several bodies had been dumped.
Army spokesman Brig Gen Mahmud Hasan said 72 army officers were still missing after the mutiny, and local media reports feared that they too had been killed.
The BDR is staffed by regular army officers seconded to the 70,000-strong force.
About 20 members of the officers’ families living on the BDR base at Dhaka where the mutiny erupted were also killed by the mutineers. BDR chief Maj Gen Ahmed’s wife was among the dead, her head crushed by a television set dropped on her semi-conscious body from a height.
Brig Hasan said tribunals would try some 1,000 BDR mutineers identified for investigation.
Though no details were released about these tribunals, an investigation by home minister Shahara Khatun into the mutiny has been tasked with completing its preliminary inquiry within a week.
Reports from Dhaka indicate that the plan underpinning the mutiny was to fuel anger among BDR personnel with the aim of provoking a reaction from the army.
This would have had serious consequences for prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s government, desperate for investment and aid in order to stabilise a restive and underdeveloped country where nearly half the population of 140 million lives in abject poverty.