বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ ত্রয়োদশ খণ্ড
curfew to drive through the city. Driving past streams of refugees, we saw burned out shacks of families living by the railroad tracks coming from Gulshan to Mohakhali crossing. A Bengali friend living close by had watched the army set fire to the bovica, and as the families ran out, he saw them shot down “like dogs' He accepted our offer to take him and his family of twelve into our home. In the old city we walked through the remains of Nayer Bazaar, where Moslem and Hindu wood cutters had worked, now only a tangle of iron, and sheet and smouldering ruins. The Hindu shopkeepers and craftsmen still alive in the bombed ruins of Shankari Bazaar, begged me to help them only hours after the army had moved in with the intention to kill all inhabitants. One man had been shot in the abdomen and killed only one half-hour before we arrived. Others were lying in the streets rotting. The day before we were evacuated. I saw Moslem names in Urdu, on. the remains of houses in Shankari Bazaar, previously a totally Hindu area. On the 29th we stood at Ramna Kali Bari, an ancient Hindu village of about two hundred fifty people in the Center of Dacca Ramna Race Course, and witnessed the stacks of machine-gunned, burning remains of men, women and children butchered in the early morning hours of March 29th I photographed the scene hours later.
Sadarghat, Shakaripatti, Raycr Bazaar, Nayer Bazaar, Pailpara and Thatari Bazaar arc a few of the places where the homes of the thousands are razed to the grounds.
At the university area on the 29th, we walked through Jagannath Hall and Iqbal Hall, two of the student dormitories at Dacca University shelled by army tanks. All inmates were slaughtered. We saw the breach in the wall where the tank broke through, the tank tracks and the mass grave in front of the hall. A man who was forced to drag the bodies outside, counted one hundred three of the Hindu students buried there. Outside were the massive holes in the walls of the dormitory, while inside were the smoking remains of the rooms and the heavily blood-stained floors. We also saw evidence of tank attack at Iqbal Hall where bodies were still unburied.
The two ensuing weeks have documented the planned killing of much of the intellectual community, including the majority of professors of Dacca University. These include: Professor G. C. Dev. Head of the Philosophy Department; Professor:Moniruzzaman, Head of the Department of Statistic; Professor Jotirmoy Guhathakurta, Head of the English Department; Dr. Naqvi and Dr. Ali, Head of the Department of History; Professor Innasali, Head of the Physics Department and Professor Dr. M. N. Huda, Head of the Economics Department, former Governor and Finance Minister were shot in their quarters, injured and left for dead. Many families of these professors were shot as well. Full documentation of the people is difficult due to the army's thorough search leaving Dacca. Complete censorship was facilitated when three prominent mass circulation dailies were burned: The People, The Ittefaq and The Sangbad.
Military action continued after the attack of the first two days. We listened as the early morning of April first was wracked for two hours by artillery pounding Jinjira, a town across the Buriganga 'from Dacca, that had swollen in size with an estimated one hundred thousand civilians fleeing terrorized Dacca. Radio Pakistan continued to broadcast that life in Dacca had returned to normal but we witnessed a nearly a deserted city.
In Gulshan, one of the suburban area of Dacca, where we lived, we witnessed the disarming of the East Pakistan Rifles, stationed in the Children's Park across the street, the
