Main Page «
Front Page «
Metro «
Business «
International «
Sports «
Editorial «
Op-Ed «
Home «
Timeout «
Letters «

Archive «
Launch Supplement «
Special Supplements «

Nearly 3,400 children below the age of 18 are killed and 1.10 lakh injured in road accidents every year in the country, according to World Health Organisation statistics.
   Of the injured, about 1,360 children had complete physical disability, the statistics showed.
   This was revealed at a seminar organised by Centre for Injury Prevention and Research, Bangladesh at Accident Research Centre of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology on Sunday to mark the first United Nations Road Safety Week.
   The theme of this year’s road safety week was ‘young road users’ as the World Health Organisation statistics revealed that youngsters were the main victims of road accidents. Every year around 1.80 lakh children die in road accidents across the world and 96 per cent of them are from the developing countries, according to the statistics.
   According to WHO, traffic accident will be the third leading reason for the global burden of disease and injury in 2020, if the current trends continue while it was on the 9th position in 1990.
   It was estimated that in 2020, about 24 lakh people would die in traffic accidents and it would be greater health, economic and social problem than malaria, tuberculosis or HIV/AIDS.
   Speakers at the seminar urged all the stakeholders and organisations to formulate an easy and short-term action policy for ensuring road safety and its proper implementation.
   Dr AKM Fazlur Rahman, the executive director of the CIPR, presented a keynote paper at the closing session of the weeklong programme. He said that road traffic injuries cost an estimated of Tk 4500 crore annually which was 2 per cent of the country’s GDP.
   He also said that the main known risk factors were human behaviours such as excess speed, careless driving, no use of safety devices and road factors like lack of footpaths, inadequate traffic signals and poor road design.
   The vehicle designs and poor conditions and poor trauma care systems are also the risk factors in road accidents.
   Hitting pedestrians is the most common accident which accounts for about 43.7 per cent of the total accidents while rear end collisions for about 16.4 per cent, head-on collisions for about 13.3 per cent and overturns for 9.4 per cent.
   He said, according to the accident statistics, Dhaka is most vulnerable and risky division and metropolitan area for road accidents.
   A Sattar, the director (operation) of BRTA, said that they had taken a road safety action plan on the Dhaka–Aricha Highway and were implementing the plan.
   He suggested that other organisations and stakeholders should take such initiatives on different vulnerable roads.
   Dr Sirajul Islam, the director of National Institute of Traumatology and Orthopaedics Rehabilitation, Dr Motafa Jamal, the national representative officer of WHO, Dr AMM Shafiullah, the vice-chancellor of BUET, and Professor Md Mazharul Hoque, the director of accident research centre and head of civil engineering department, also addressed the seminar.

Different dance groups held programmes in Dhaka on Sunday to mark World Dance Day.
   The main attraction of the programmes was a programme organised by the Bangladesh Dance Artistes’ Association.
   The organisation marked the day with programmes on the concluding day of its weeklong dance festival at the National Theatre Hall of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy at Segun Bagicha.
   Folklorist Ashraf Siddiqee was present as chief guest and the association’s president Rahiza Khanam Jhunu chaired a discussion session held as part of the programme.
   Ashraf said dance is an important part of Bangladesh’s culture. ‘Since time immemorial, dance has been performed in this region. In Bangladesh, dance has developed on folk tales.’
   Twenty one dance groups, including four groups from outside Dhaka, performed classical, contemporary, folk and creative dances.
   The association organised the festival, which began on April 23, in all the divisional headquarters and three district headquarters — Mymensingh, Faridpur and Bogra.
   The Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy held a dance and discussion programme on a small scale at the National Art Gallery Plaza of the academy.
   The director of music and dance department of the academy, Sunil Chandra Das, production department director Zinat Barkatullah and the Bangladesh Dance Artistes’ Association president, Rahiza Khanam Jhunu, spoke on the occasion.
   Dance group Nrityadhara held a dance programme involving autistic children to mark the day on Eskaton Road in Dhaka.
   Another three-day dance festival, Swadesh Nabanritya Utsab, began at the Shaukat Osman Auditorium of Poet Sufia Kamal Public Library at Shahbagh on Sunday.
   The Dhaka mayor, Sadeque Hossain Khoka, inaugurated the programme organised by dance circle Nabanritya in collaboration with the Chinese embassy.
   On the first day, the programmes featured dance performance by Kabirul Islam Ratan, Sadia Islam Mou, Dipa Khandaker’s group, Zinia and Mukul followed by performances by dance groups from Khulna, Chittagong and Manikganj.
   A dance play directed by Rhija Khanam Jhunu and produced by the Bulbul Lalitokala Academy was staged on the occasion.
   Today’s programme will feature dance performances by Sultana Haider and groups from Feni, Noakhali, Nawabganj.
   The festival will begin at 5:00pm every day.

Freedom fighters on Sunday requested the interim government not to take up too many schemes but keep to a specific agenda for fighting against corruption and holding credible elections.
   They also requested the administration not hand over power before the mission was accomplished.
   Supporting the activities of the army-backed government, they said the country would face serious troubles if the government failed to succeed.
   The freedom fighters’ opinions came at a roundtable on ‘expectation of liberation war and today’s Bangladesh’ organised by the Muktijoddha Gana Parishad at the Dhaka Reporters’ Unity auditorium.
   They said a new window of opportunity had been opened for the country after January 11 and that they did not want to see the same Bangladesh again in the future.
   ‘They [the government] should prioritise their tasks. But it seems, they have started without proper groundwork,’ observed retired major general Amin Ahmed Chowdhury. He urged the government not to listen to too many people in discharging its duties.
   He said the main focus of the government should be finishing its tasks in the quickest possible time by setting up a comprehensive plan of actions. ‘If they can hold fair general polls, 90 per cent of their task will be finished.’
   The moderator of the roundtable, retired major general Mohammad Ibrahim, painted a gloomy picture of the freedom fighters, who he said were divided in their beliefs and locked in a competition to be leaders of various organisations of freedom fighters.
   He urged the country’s liberation war veterans to be united again and work with the same spirit of the war to materialise their dreams of 1971. ‘We should not keep the spirit confined to our emotions and discussions.’
   Bangladesh is the result of the liberation war, announced freedom fighter Syed Abul Bashar. But he blamed politicians and some other professionals for destroying the dreams of the country’s liberators to build an exploitation-free, prosperous, nation where there would be no discrimination.
   Professor Asif Nazrul said the interim government should take as much time required for bringing reforms in the Election Commission, strengthening the Anti-Corruption Commission, and cleansing the corrupt and criminalised politics and society.
   Akku Chowdhury, a trustee of the Liberation War Museum, offered to help the leaders and commanders of the liberation war, if they again took up an initiative to wage war for the cause of the country.
   Freedom fighters from across the country expressed their dismay at the discussion at the failure of successive governments to differentiate between the genuine and the fake freedom fighters. They said many fake ones were rewarded as freedom fighters while many genuine ones were passing days in miseries.
   They also blamed the governments for failure to write a real history of the liberation war and, instead, for distorting it, creating confusion among the new generations.
   Sadek Ahmed Khan, secretary general of Muktijodha Gana Parishad, in the keynote paper urged the freedom fighters to forget differences and unite again on the same platform to rescue the country.
   Professor Abul Barakat said the freedom fighters should not support the interim government if it failed to be non-communal and non-partisan in running the country.
   Language movement veteran MA Matin and freedom fighters Jamal Uddin and Amir Hossain Molla, among others, also took part in the discussion chaired by Ishtiaq Aziz Ulfat.

A woman filed a case with a local court on Sunday accusing former state minister Fazlur Rahman Patal and his 17 supporters of killing her son.
   Basirun Nesa, wife of Md Amzad Hossain, of Balitita Islampur village under Lalpur upazila, filed the case with the cognizance court. According to the petition, the Lalpur UP chairman and Thana BNP vice-president Md Atiqul Haq Biswas called Sukur Ali, 32, out of the house and took him to the residence of Ghangdhupoil UP chairman Bulbul Ahmed where he was beaten to death on instruction by Patal.
   After hearing the case, the court asked the Lalpur police to take legal action against the accused.

The biodiversity of Hakaluki Haor, an ecologically critical area, is under threat as a section of fishermen has been catching fish by drying up its bed.
   According to local sources, the fishermen posing as farmers take permission from the upazila administrations to irrigate their fields adjacent to the haor and then pump different areas of the haor dry in the name of irrigation, although their main target is fishing. The illegal practice has already seen extinction of a number of species of fish and aquatic plants, environment department sources said.
   The environment and the fisheries departments in a joint drive on Friday recovered 480kg of contraband current nets and nets used for catching fish-fry worth about from the Kulaura portion of the haor.
   A source at the environment department’s Kulaura office said during the drive conducted at Bhattera, Boromchal and Bhukshimul areas of the haor the two departments caught red-handed a number of people engaged to catching fish-fries and recovered the nets.
   Earlier, the environment department had seized 16 irrigation pumps and 74.65kg more of fishing nets used for drying up the water of haor area and illegal fishing.
   Fanindra Chandra Sarker, Kulaura upazila fisheries officer, said it was the peak breading season of fishes in the haor and catching of egg-bearing fishes was strictly banned by the government.
   The haor is surrounded by government land. Besides, due to negligence and disregard over the years various pockets of the haor have also been filled up by silt and a vast tract of such land has been turned into cropland and recorded as government land. A portion of this government land has been leased out for one year. But other portions have been brought under cultivation by local farmers without getting any lease. Various parts of the haor have also been leased out to local fishermen.
   Although fishing by pumping out water of the haor is strictly prohibited by the law, every dry season these leaseholders carry out this misdeed devastating this natural marshland, which Md Shibli, environment department official at Kulaura upazila of Moulvibazar, said have seen an alarming increase in the recent months.
   Zahirul Alam, assistant commissioner (land) of Baralekha upazila, said they had allowed irrigation of the boro fields adjacent to the haor, but as the boro season was over, so the permissions were also cancelled.
   According to the fisheries and environment departments, now only 30 to 40 out of a total 300 marshes in the haor are in their natural state, with the rest either filled up by silted or ruined by abuse.

A seminar on the prospects of Nepali tourism products and new Nepal brands was held in Dhaka on Sunday.
   The Nepal Tourism Board and the Embassy of Nepal jointly organised the event.
   The charge d’ affaires of the Nepalese embassy in Dhaka, Ramesh Prasad Khanal, briefed the audience about the tourism prospects of Nepal, new brands of Nepal’s tourism products and potentials of Bangladesh market for Nepali tourism.
   Mansur Hassan, president of the Tour Operators of Bangladesh, highlighted the hospitality and kindness of Nepali people offered to the guests.
   The Embassy of Nepal and the Nepal Tourism Board will hold similar tourism promotion programmes in Chittagong today and Sylhet on Wednesday.
   A large number of journalists, senior reporters, travel trade writers, tour and travel operators, and corporate houses of Bangladesh participated in the program.

The Rapid Action Battalion on Sunday arrested Tariqul Islam, junior audit officer of Monirampur accounts office in Jessore when he was taking bribe from a retired employee of the office for the release of Tk 4 lakh that has been due since 1999.
   He demanded Tk 40,000 from the Class III employee, Md Abu Khan, to release the money at the earliest.
   The Class II employee went there to make a partial payment of Tk 10,000 at about 2:00pm. But he had informed the battalion of the incident before he started for the office.
   Tariqul was being interrogated till Sunday evening.

Two accused persons in the sensational Bushra rape and murder case managed to be released from jail by having the order of the Supreme Court suppressed. How the politically influential brothers, who are members of the Awami League, got the order suppressed remains a mystery.
   Sheikh Shawkat Ahmed Rahul and Sheikh Kabir Ahmed, two brothers who are known to be Awami League leaders, were released from jail on April 23, though the case is still pending with the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court.
   They were released in accordance with an order passed by the Prevention of Women and Children Repression Tribunal-3 of Dhaka on April 18 for their release, deputy attorney-general Golam Kibria, who is moving the case for the state, told New Age on Sunday.
   Bushra, a college student, was found dead on her bed in her residence at Malibag Chowdhury Para on July 1, 2000. Forensic examination showed that she was raped before the murder. Her mother filed a First Information Report with Ramna thana on July 2, 2000.
   The judge of the tribunal penned down the judgement of the case on June 30, 2003, awarding the death penalty to MA Kader, brother-in-law of Bushra’s maternal aunt, and Kader’s brother-in-laws Rahul and Kabir, and sentencing his wife Runu Kader to life-term imprisonment.
   The High Court, however, on January 29 acquitted Rahul and Kabir, but upheld the sentences of the other accused persons.
   The government preferred an appeal against the acquittal, and the Appellate Division on February 6 stayed the operation of the High Court’s verdict, which had acquitted Rahul and Kabir, till May 27.
   The copies of the order of the Appellate Division in this regard were sent to the deputy commissioner of Dhaka and the tribunal on March 5 and March 14 respectively.
   But the accused persons managed to get released by having the Appellate Division’s order suppressed.

Government promulgation of an administrative order defining hoarding and other corrective measures for streamlining the wayward market is coming soon.
   The law ministry is vetting the new-generation marketing rules before approval, with some changes made to the timeframe for storing commodities, official sources said. Sources at the ministries concerned said that the government within the shortest possible time would give the approval after its vetting by the law ministry.
   They said that the time for stocking most of the essential nine items under purview of the measures would be cut short.
   ‘Most of the timeframes will be decreased – very little will be increased,’ said a senior official of the commerce ministry, seeking anonymity. He did not elaborate.

The irregularities in appointment of judges in the past need at least 20 years to remove, observed chief justice Ruhul Amin on Sunday.
   Addressing a reception accorded to senior lawyers at the district bar in the afternoon he as chief guest said there was no scope of indiscipline in the judiciary.
   A judge must be prudent and he must follow the code of conduct, added the chief justice.
   Referring to separation of judiciary the chief justice said it was not possible for judges alone to implement it. It needs concerted efforts of the bar and bench.
   District and sessions judge AFM Mostafa, judges, magistrates and lawyers attended the function.
   Lakshipur correspondent of the news agency said, the chief justice attended a reception accorded to him by the district bar association on the day.
   He advised the judges and magistrates to apply wisdom in dispensation of justice to the litigants. Efforts should be made for speedy trial of cases by attending the court full time.
   Expressing satisfaction with the presence of Justice Ruhul Amin among them, the lawyers said this is for the first time in 120 years that a chief justice visited Lakshipur bar since it began the journey with a Chowki Munsef Court in 1887.

The police recovered the body of a schoolboy from a bush beside the Civil Aviation Authority of Bangladesh staff quarters on Sunday evening 24 hours after he had gone missing from Gaoair in the city.
   The police also arrested two people in connection with the incident. The police said Saidur, 7, a nursery student at the local PL Shishu Manjari, a kindergarten school, went out of his Gaoair residence at about 8:00pm Saturday to buy something from a nearby shop. Since then he had been missing.
   His father Babul Miah is an expatriate Bangladeshi worker in Kuwait. At about 8:30am Sunday, one Khaled Hossain Zakir phoned to the Saidur’s elder sister Parveen Akter. The man phoned to Parveen again and asked her to pay Tk 50,000 as ransom.
   On information, the Dakkhinkhan police followed Parveen when she went with the money to the abductors.
   A rickshaw-puller, Babul Miah, took Parveen to Tongi and when Khaled received the money from Parveen, the plainclothes policemen following Parveen caught both Khaled and Babul at about 4:00pm.

The establishment ministry on Sunday transferred a joint secretary and five deputy secretaries.
   Shyamal Kanti Ghosh, an officer on special duty (joint secretary), has been posted to the labour department as director.
   ATM Mostafa Kamal, deputy secretary of the health and family welfare ministry, has been transferred to the directorate general of family planning as director, Md Abul Kalam Azad, director of the National Sports Council, to the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics as director and Md Shahnewaj Choudhury, another director of the National Sports Council, to the model village project II as deputy director.
   Md Hyul Quyum, deputy director of the Bangladesh Public Administration Training Centre, has been sent to the National Sports Council and Md Akbar Husain, additional deputy commissioner of Narayanganj, to the National Sports Council as director.

Hasina Mohiuddin, wife of the Chittagong mayor, ABM Mohiuddin Chowdhury, now in jail, has demanded that the government should take steps for the treatment of her husband.
   ‘He is a patient of open heart surgery and his condition has been deteriorating day by day,’ she said in a statement issued Saturday night after meeting the mayor in the Bandarban jail.
   Hasina said her husband had been suffering from other diseases, adding there was no specialist physician in Bandarban to treat such a patient.
   She urged the government to take steps for the proper treatment of Mohiuddin after transferring him from the Bandarban jail.

An inquiry committee formed to investigate admission forgery at Dhaka University has detected 33 more such cases in two departments and two institutes.
   The list of the new cases will be submitted at the committee meeting scheduled for May 5.
   Some members on the committee on Sunday said of the new admission forgeries, about 20 took place at the public administration department, 8 at the international relations department, 4 at the Social Welfare and Research Institute and at least 1 at the Institute of Education and Research.
   The vice-chancellor, SMA Faiz, said such investigations would continue until all the admission forgeries are detected.
   The committee, headed by the pro-vice-chancellor, AFM Yusuf Haider, was formed on October 10, 2006. A list of 52 such cases detected as of April was published by the authorities on April 23.

Two witnesses Sunday gave their depositions in court in a case against former president HM Ershad for ‘corruption’ in the purchase of electronic newsgathering equipment.
   Saiful Bari, former chairman of the National Transmission Centre, and Nowsher Ali, former chief engineer of the BTV, gave their depositions to special divisional judge Malik Abdullah Al Amin from 10:30am to 11:25am.
   The witnesses said the ENG unit equipment was bought in line with government rules.
   The ENG unit was bought for the National Transmission Centre under the approved quota for the president’s secretariat.
   The equipment was bought to record and transmit government relief activities after the 1988 floods. BTV had neither financial allocation nor equipment at the time. The witnesses did not mention how much loss Ershad inflicted on the state by allocating the money and purchasing the ENG unit.
   They are number 3 and 4 witnesses in the case. On March 27, the number 2 witness in the case, the then deputy assistant engineer of BTV Iqbal Ahmed, gave depositions before the same court.
   Lawyer Sheikh Sirajul Islam defended Ershad in court while assistant public prosecutor Ruhul Amin represented the state.

The administration on Sunday transferred 15 assistant superintendents of police to different places across the country.
   Five of them were given postings at the Rapid Action Battalion. They are AKM Akteruzzaman of the Khulna Metropolitan Police, Mohammad Ehsan Sattar of the police headquarters, Nabid Kamal Shaibal of Narayanganj, Belayet Hossain of Narsingdi and Mohammad Abdul Halim of Gazipur.
   Four were transferred to the police headquarters. They are Babul Akter of RAB-2, Mahbubul Karim of RAB-8, Salam Kabir of the Special Branch and SM Mostain Hosain of the Detective Branch of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police.
   AKM Rakib of Tangail was transferred to Jhenaidah, Shafijul Islam of Gopalganj to Patuakhali, Jasimuddin Mollah of Manikganj to Tangail, Abdul Matin of Gopalganj to Feni, Moazzem Hossain Shah of Tangail to Nilphamari and Prabir Kumar Roy of Patuakhali to Gopalganj, said sources in the police.