New Age: The Awami League president, Sheikh Hasina, on Tuesday said that when she was in jail, the authorities had approached her for names of her party colleagues who she thought were harmful to her, so that they could be punished.
'When I was in the special jail, the authorities had asked me to name the people in the party who I thought were a threat to me, but I did not name anyone… I told them Allah will take care of that’, she said while exchanging views with a delegation of a faction of the Islami Oikya Jote, led by its president Moulana Misbahur Rahman Chowdhury, at her political office at Dhanmondi in Dhaka.
She said that a similar proposal was made to ‘my neighbour’ in jail at that time and she [neighbour] had given the authorities the names of her rivals in her party and they had been arrested and punished accordingly. Sheikh Hasina and her arch political rival, BNP chairperson Khaleda Zia had been in separate special jails set up in close proximity on the Jatiya Sangsad complex for several months after they had been arrested by the military-controlled interim administration in late 2007.
The AL chief said the authorities had again tried to force her into naming her rivals in the party after her ‘neighbour’ supplied the names of her own party rivals. ‘Not all children of a mother are alike’, she said. ‘Is it the way to drive them out of home’, she said in an oblique reference to the expulsion of ‘reformist’ leaders from the BNP.
‘I have had brushes with death as many as 19 times, including the grenade attacks on my rally on August 21, 2004. But I am alive… Allah saved me every time...’, Hasina told the gathering. The former PM condemned the attacks on the baul sculptures at Ddaka airport and the Balaka at Motijheel. She said there were sculptures in many Muslim countries, including Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Egypt and Syria. The AL chief also condemned the extremists who were striking terror in the name of Islam and urged the Ulema to spread the true messages of Islam so that religion could be saved from distortion and misinterpretation.
