Between 25 and 30 truckloads of troops drove past the hotel towards the campus, about a mile and a half away. Prolonged reports of automatic weapons fire resounded from the campus direction soon after.
A few more artillery rounds landed in that direction around 2 a. m. and by 2:30, two large buildings were in flames, the first huge blaze of the night. Bengali journalists at the hotel identified them from a 10th floor window as Iqbal and Mohsin Halls, regarded as hotbeds of Awami League student activity.
About 2:15 troops from the hotel guard moved across the street to an alley leading to the office of an impecunious but popular English language newspaper. The People, which had been outspoken and often totally irresponsible in its vilification of the government.
Two wrecked cars from a wrecking garage in the alley previously had been dragged into an impromptu barricade, and the troops fired hundreds of rounds into the cars before they moved into remove them. At one point, voices from the seconds floor of the garage shouted “Bengalis unite,” and the troops responded with hundreds of rounds of rifle and machinegun fire.
At this point a group of about 15 empty handed students came down the boulevard beside the hotel shouting defiantly.
The soldiers turned the jeep mounted machinegun toward the youths and opened fire. The students scattered and ran away, pursued by several jeep loads of soldiers.
Then the troops returned to the garage from which the unity slogan had come. They tore off the doors and sent a few men inside. When they emerged a few seconds late a small fire was burning near the door. It quickly spread and consumed the garage and all its contents.
The soldiers moved down the alley toward the newspaper office firing all the way. When they reached the entrance, they shouted warnings but they were spoken in Urdu, the language of west Pakistan, which is not widely understood in East Bengal. No one emerged, and the soldiers fired a rocket into building, poured hundreds of rounds into it with automatic weapons and the machine guns.
Tearing off the door they entered for a few seconds then left the office and one next to it in flames. On their way back to the hotel grounds, they shouted “narai takbir" a Muslim shout meaning “Victory for God" that is associated with the Pakistan movemement.
They also shouted “We have won the war" in Urdu. Two of them then came inside the hotel about 4 a.m. and got a jug of tea to take out.
By this time, half a dozen large fires blazed in every direction and at about 4:15 a.m. the largest fire of the night broke out in the direction of the cantonment of the East Pakistan Riffles.
This fire burned for hours, and for the first half hour it was punctuated by dozens of large bright flashes and explosions similar to those made by an exploding ammunition dump. At its height, it appeared to cover two acres or more. It sent flame licking high into the sky for hours, and a column of smoke rose hundreds of feet into the air.
