A guard of the Al-Badr camp in Sherpur on Tuesday told the International Crimes Tribunal-2 that the detained assistant secretary general of Jamaat, Mohammad Kamaruzzaman, used to control recruitment and transfer of Al-Badr members during the War of Independence in 1971.
Md Monowar Hossain Khan, better known as Mohon Munshi, the second prosecution witness against Kamaruzzaman, revealed this while being cross-examined by defence counsel Mohammad Kafil Uddin Chowdhury for the third day.
Kamaruzzaman was in the dock.
‘I and my sir Kamaruzzaman together fled from the camp two days before Sherpur became free. I met him again a long time after independence when he contested in the elections,’ said the guard of the Al-Badr camp set up at Surendra Saha’s house in Sherpur.
Mohon, now a school peon, said the Al-Badr men had no identity cards.
He said that he used to stay on the ground-floor when Kamaruzzaman used to hold meetings on the first-floor of the camp.
There was no one at the camp in Surendra Saha’s house to guard arms, and the arms were not kept in the house, he said, adding that everyone used to keep their arms in their own possession.
The Pakistani soldiers used to talk in the Urdu language which, he said, he could not understand, and they used to talk to Kamaruzzaman.
The prosecution witness said he had never been to the house of Kamaruzzaman located in Bajitkhila-Koroitala in Sherpur municipality.
‘I cannot remember whether Bajitkhila-Koroitala is under the municipality,’ he later said.
He said that the Pakistani army, Razakars and Al-Badr had separate camps.
Mohon, who never went to school, said that he did not know whether Kamaruzzaman had refrained from sitting for the examination in 1971 in response to the freedom fighters’ call not to take part in the examination.
He denied the defence counsel’s allegation that he, profiting financially and in other ways from his enemies and political rivals, had made false and baseless statements.
During the cross-examination, Mohon contradicted a part of his statement that he made in his July 25 deposition.
In his deposition, he had said that Kamaruzzaman said that he would have to go to Nakla and had left the camp with 20 to 25 armed Razakars, caught a young Hindu named Sushil, brought him to Nayanibari camp, forcibly converted him to Islam and then taken him to the camp in Surendra Saha’s house.
But, during cross-examination by the defence counsel, Mohon told the tribunal that Sushil was forcibly converted to Islam at the camp in Surendra Saha’s house and then taken to Nayanibari camp.
Mohon also said that Sushil, after being converted to Islam, stayed at the Nayanibari camp for seven to eight days and did not stay at the camp in Surendra Saha’s house for a single day.
When the cross-examination ended, the tribunal adjourned the proceedings of the case till Wednesday.
In the beginning of the first session in the morning, the tribunal rejected a defence application for review of the tribunal’s July 19 order that rejected the defence plea for the correct and verbatim recording of the statement of Md Hamidul Haque, first prosecution witness in Kamaruzzaman’s case.