Bangladesh Police have arrested this Thursday Mohamed Mozafar Hosain, a retired and convicted former military man who had been on the run for decades for his involvement in the 1981 assassination of former president Ziaur Rahman, considered the father of current prime minister Tarique Rahman.
The Deputy Commissioner of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police and head of the Detective Division, Md Shafiqul Islam, confirmed the capture of the accused this Thursday, after he had been at large for more than 45 years. Investigations suggest that Mozafar had remained hidden in India using a false identity.
Rahman, who broadcast the historic declaration of independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan on radio when he was an army officer, became head of state in 1977 after a succession of coups that destabilized the country two years earlier.
In August 1975, a group of military officers assassinated the first president of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and established a military junta headed by Khondaker Mostaq, who subsequently appointed Ziaur Rahman as Chief of Army Staff.
Shortly after, General Khaled Mosharraf led a counter-coup to seize power, removed Mostaq and placed Ziaur Rahman under house arrest, although a subsequent revolt secured his release and gave him 'de facto' leadership of the country.
Ziaur Rahman, founder of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and veteran of the 1965 Indo-Pakistani war, was assassinated during an official visit to Chittagong, in the south of the country, on May 30, 1981, as part of a failed military coup led by Major General Manzur Ahmed.
A military tribunal prosecuted at least 18 officers for the assassination, of whom twelve were executed, while about twenty were expelled from the Armed Forces.