Today is "Martyred Intellectuals Day". This day in 1971, on the eve of the country's independence the Pakistan army in collusion with their quislings the para-military force, Al-Badr, picked up and killed the cream of Bangladesh's intelligentsia.
The national flag will fly at half-mast and black flags will be hoisted atop all national institutions.
Bangladesh will pay homage to the victims of the indiscriminate killing of the nation's sharpest minds by the Pakistani Army and its collaborators on Dec 14, 1971 during the Liberation War.
Sensing defeat in the War, the Pakistani occupation army and its collaborators killed many university teachers, doctors, artists, writers, journalists and other prominent Bengalis just two days before their surrender, in a desperate act of vengeance.
They were systematically rounded up from their homes in the middle of the night, taken to torture cells throughout the city, brutalised for hours, and finally assembled on various killing fields and executed en masse.
The bodies of the slain intellectuals were found with marks of tortures in the capital’s Mirpur and Rayerbazar where the monuments have been built to immortalise them.
Elaborate programs have been chalked out to observe the Day, nationally. Bangladeshis will pay respect to the martyred intellectuals by placing flowers on the Martyred Intellectuals Memorial.
President Md. Abdul Hamid and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina have issued separate messages to commemorate the Martyred Intellectuals Day.
