That the impunity of law enforcing agencies, particularly the Rapid Action Battalion, has reached a completely unacceptable point has been proved once again with the police ‘failing’ to find RAB link to the shooting of Limon Hossain, a poor college student in Jhalakathi whose leg had to be amputated after being shot at in 2011. Every newspaper reader, every TV viewer and every radio listener, not to mention the local people concerned, know that a group of battalion members shot at the 16-year-old poor schoolboy in the leg on March 23, 2011 when he was taking cows to a grazing field, without caring to verify his identity. The battalion also arrested him the same day.
Notably, after inflicting such a grave injustice to the boy, the battalion filed two case with the local police under different acts on March 23 and March 24 against a crime gang and included the innocent boy into the list! But the police initially refused to register a case, initiated by Limon’s mother, against the guilty battalion personnel. The police eventually took the case only after intervention of the national media, human rights groups and the order of a magistrate’s court on April 24. Clearly, the police stood for the battalion that maimed the innocent boy. The police bias against Limon, meanwhile, came to surface again when it secretly submitted a charge sheet on July 1, 2012 in the case filed by the battalion on March 24, claiming that Limon was guilty of creating obstacles to the battalion’s performing public duty! Besides, the police submitted a similar charge sheet against the boy in another case filed by the battalion. Now, contrary to public information, the police say that they did not find any RAB link to shooting at Limon which maimed the laborious poor student. The pretext is simple: the investigation officer did not find any witnesses to and evidence of the RAB shooting!
The police report is ridiculous. Many local people, let alone Limon, told the media after the incident that the errant battalion team shot Limon in the leg after taking him to a place near his house at Jamadarhat of Rajapur on Jhalakathi on March 23 and arrested him then and there. The wounded boy was not given proper treatment on time while in police custody. The next developments are known to everybody: Limon’s left leg up to the thigh was amputated on March 27, 2011 and he secured bail from the High Court on May 5 and was released from jail custody in Barisal hospital on May 9, 2011. Under the circumstances, it is important for conscientious citizens to ask the police as to who had shot Limon, if not RAB?
Clearly, there is a police and RAB nexus which is visibly determined to deprive the poor Limon, who used to work in a brick kiln to bear his educational expenses, of justice. In other words, the two law enforcement agencies, who have carried out more than a thousand extrajudicial murders for more than a decade now, let alone inflicting injustice on thousands of politically weak poor citizens, are now in unison to perpetuate their impunity against law. It is time that democratically oriented section of society put up resistance against the unholy nexus and the indifferent political incumbents of the day who had promised the citizens the rule of law.