Hunt for the mastermind behind the BDR mutiny
Maswood Alam Khan | Sunday, 8 March 2009
THE first lesson a probationary crime detective learns from his mentor: "Sharpen your eyes, prick your ears up, accentuate your senses and whet your appetite for finding the actual motive of a criminal. Once you are certain about the motive of a murderer you are already winner of the battle in your quest for the killer. Now you comb the terrain for traces and untangle the clues that relate the motive to identify and confirm the criminals on and off the stage. Otherwise, you would be lost in the wonderland looking for needles and pins in one haystack after another".
And the first lesson a probationary killer learns from his mentor: "Play chess. Learn how to place an 'en prise' (a French term that literally means 'in take') in order to trick your opponent. Of course, you should observe minutely how your opponent usually behaves in reacting to your moves while safeguarding his domain. If your opponent, without suspecting your long-range strategy, captures a chess piece as lucrative as a rook you have offered as an 'en prise', you know your challenger is now left open to your mortal attack".
Your mentor, a veteran criminal, will advise you: "Once you find in yourself an apt chess player and are equipped with enough knowledge on criminal laws of the land, forensic devices used by law enforcement agencies and the way journalists probe into an incident, you are eligible for a job of professional killing. You may now embark upon your maiden journey as a probationary contract killer, a vocation nowadays in high demand in our dark society, on your way to be a mastermind".
A smart criminal is not in a hurry to commit a crime. He is calm and patient in designing his plan seamlessly. He implements his plan as meticulously as a technician unwearyingly performs a critical job in a scientific laboratory. The prime aim of a professional murderer is to mislead the investigating officer and the journalists who will be arriving at the crime scene; he places an 'en prise'---a phony clue---which he hopes the investigating officers and the pressmen out of their gullibility will capture and proceed through a wrong track to get a false motive of the criminal. The professional killer designs his crime plan with one eye upon the police investigating officer who he knows will place the incident in a court of law for a trial based on 150 years old penal codes and another eye upon the journalists who he knows will flush the incident out for mass media based on their experience in crime reporting.
In this age of state-of-the-art forensic technology, a suspect can easily be captured by matching his DNA with that of blood, skin, saliva or one single hair found at a crime scene, thanks to a molecular device called 'genetic fingerprinting' and a suspect cannot afford suppressing the truth when he wears a special headband with electronic sensors which monitor an electrical signal (known as P300) that reflexively emits from the memory storage of the criminal's brain the moment he finds on a monitor the victim's face, the crime scene, or the weapon used during the crime, thanks to a contrivance called 'brain fingerprinting'.
So, the modern professional killer remains at least 100 miles away from the scene of crime when the crime is perpetuated by a hired hit-man who must be poor and hungry and whose sensory organs and capillary nerves in his brain are made numb at the time of committing the crime---by the weight of money, or by the dose of sedative drug an assassin compulsorily takes before assassination, or by the falsified depth of misguided spiritual indoctrination, or by all these three incentives combined.
The question "What was the motive of BDR jawans behind staging their mutiny on 25 February 2009?" is now a million dollar riddle the whole nation is splitting hairs to solve. The mastermind behind the mutiny also rehearsed before a mirror asking himself the same question and replying to himself with a variety of answers several times a day while he had been spending several weeks preparing the grand plot. He knew very well what would be the answers people in general would find immediately after the mutiny and the probable answers the investigators would derive out from the extracted confessions of the arrested mutineers (the hit-men), ultimately leading the investigators to the den the mastermind would be hiding in.
So, with a view to encapsulating himself out of harm's way the mastermind knows how to segregate sections of his plot in watertight compartments which would lead the smartest investigator only to an end short of his den; he also knows people, as well as journalists, will forget the tragedy in a matter of time and the investigators' files would soon be gathering dust.
Leaders of BDR mutiny declared that their colleagues had long been deprived of their due privileges and that as long as officers from the Army would remain their commanding officers their plight will never come to an end. Dues they demanded included 80 per cent rations, remunerations (or kickbacks) they were promised for their works in 'dal-bhat' (open market sales through BDR outlets) programmes and for their duties during the recent elections held throughout the country. They also demanded they like soldiers in Army be sent as members of UN peace keeping missions so that they could accumulate a substantial amount of money as savings to be earned from their deputed services in the missions abroad.
Everybody will agree that the BDR jawans had reasons to feel frustrated if they were denied their dues. But, later what we could glean from TV footages was that the slain Director General of BDR Major General Shakil Ahmed was all along sincere in broaching to the government the plights and deprivation of BDR soldiers. It is difficult for civilians like us to understand why the decades-old traditional supervision of BDR personnel by deputed army officers was all on a sudden a bone of contention that agitated the BDR jawans against the army!
BDR jawans, if they were truly frustrated, could easily stage a mutiny by enfolding the entire BDR camp in Pilkhana and taking all the army officers along with their family members hostage till the government intervened for a solution. Why was the genocide? Why were the officers singled out to be killed? Why were the ladies violated? What was the behind-the-stage motive that prodded the mastermind to design a plot that would guarantee wholesale killing of brilliant army officers in the name of mutiny? Who is the mastermind?
Answers to these questions are difficult even to the investigators who are still poring over the entire episode and sorting out minuscule traces for clues until assimilation, dissection, and crystallization of all the pieces of evidence is complete. Any speculative answer or any conspiracy theory made by an observer may be grossly detrimental to the investigation process.
Whatever the answers the investigators present to the nation at the end of a week or a month, I, like most of the newspaper readers, am confident that the aim of the mastermind of the mutiny was not to help the BDR jawans realise their demands for arrears of dues or for their enlistment as future members of UN peacekeeping missions.
The mastermind merely agitated the jawans reminding them of their deprivations; his main goal however was to kill the army officers either to fulfill his personal desire for vengeance or to help a particular group achieve a broader goal. The broader goal could be to satiate a group of people who, perhaps due to presence of some honest army officers in pivotal positions of BDR, were deprived of their illicit earnings, say, from smuggling or to satiate another group of people who were justifiably or unjustifiably harassed by the Army in their traditional ways of doing business or politics.
We should remember that the masterminds of plots, as history suggests, always remain elusive and invisible in their roles to perform long-term missions. Lest people revolt in frustrations, the masterminds throw for public consumptions grains of psychological fodder like Bangla Bhai of JMB (a rook) or DAD Tauhid of BDR (a knight) or one Tota Mia (a scapegoat) who, protected by bulletproof jackets and helmets and tied in shackles, would periodically appear in TV screens moving in and out of trial courts. They would ultimately be executed satiating the aggrieved TV viewers. But, the TV viewers will never come to learn that the executed were in fact hired hit-men who were duped by the masterminds into detonating the bombs.
However, executions of Bangla Bhai or DAD Tauhid or Tota Mia will not herald an end of a plot or a mutiny as long as the masterminds are able to encapsulate themselves inside a den out of harm's way and are free to engineer the next plot. Unless the investigators are politically neutral, morally honest and professionally aggressive we would continue seeing chess pieces like a castle, a rook, a knight, a king, or a queen being captured by some invisible hands who will continue placing fresh chess pieces on the black and white squares of fresh chessboards to play their chess games over and over again.
The writer is a banker who may be reached at [email protected]
And the first lesson a probationary killer learns from his mentor: "Play chess. Learn how to place an 'en prise' (a French term that literally means 'in take') in order to trick your opponent. Of course, you should observe minutely how your opponent usually behaves in reacting to your moves while safeguarding his domain. If your opponent, without suspecting your long-range strategy, captures a chess piece as lucrative as a rook you have offered as an 'en prise', you know your challenger is now left open to your mortal attack".
Your mentor, a veteran criminal, will advise you: "Once you find in yourself an apt chess player and are equipped with enough knowledge on criminal laws of the land, forensic devices used by law enforcement agencies and the way journalists probe into an incident, you are eligible for a job of professional killing. You may now embark upon your maiden journey as a probationary contract killer, a vocation nowadays in high demand in our dark society, on your way to be a mastermind".
A smart criminal is not in a hurry to commit a crime. He is calm and patient in designing his plan seamlessly. He implements his plan as meticulously as a technician unwearyingly performs a critical job in a scientific laboratory. The prime aim of a professional murderer is to mislead the investigating officer and the journalists who will be arriving at the crime scene; he places an 'en prise'---a phony clue---which he hopes the investigating officers and the pressmen out of their gullibility will capture and proceed through a wrong track to get a false motive of the criminal. The professional killer designs his crime plan with one eye upon the police investigating officer who he knows will place the incident in a court of law for a trial based on 150 years old penal codes and another eye upon the journalists who he knows will flush the incident out for mass media based on their experience in crime reporting.
In this age of state-of-the-art forensic technology, a suspect can easily be captured by matching his DNA with that of blood, skin, saliva or one single hair found at a crime scene, thanks to a molecular device called 'genetic fingerprinting' and a suspect cannot afford suppressing the truth when he wears a special headband with electronic sensors which monitor an electrical signal (known as P300) that reflexively emits from the memory storage of the criminal's brain the moment he finds on a monitor the victim's face, the crime scene, or the weapon used during the crime, thanks to a contrivance called 'brain fingerprinting'.
So, the modern professional killer remains at least 100 miles away from the scene of crime when the crime is perpetuated by a hired hit-man who must be poor and hungry and whose sensory organs and capillary nerves in his brain are made numb at the time of committing the crime---by the weight of money, or by the dose of sedative drug an assassin compulsorily takes before assassination, or by the falsified depth of misguided spiritual indoctrination, or by all these three incentives combined.
The question "What was the motive of BDR jawans behind staging their mutiny on 25 February 2009?" is now a million dollar riddle the whole nation is splitting hairs to solve. The mastermind behind the mutiny also rehearsed before a mirror asking himself the same question and replying to himself with a variety of answers several times a day while he had been spending several weeks preparing the grand plot. He knew very well what would be the answers people in general would find immediately after the mutiny and the probable answers the investigators would derive out from the extracted confessions of the arrested mutineers (the hit-men), ultimately leading the investigators to the den the mastermind would be hiding in.
So, with a view to encapsulating himself out of harm's way the mastermind knows how to segregate sections of his plot in watertight compartments which would lead the smartest investigator only to an end short of his den; he also knows people, as well as journalists, will forget the tragedy in a matter of time and the investigators' files would soon be gathering dust.
Leaders of BDR mutiny declared that their colleagues had long been deprived of their due privileges and that as long as officers from the Army would remain their commanding officers their plight will never come to an end. Dues they demanded included 80 per cent rations, remunerations (or kickbacks) they were promised for their works in 'dal-bhat' (open market sales through BDR outlets) programmes and for their duties during the recent elections held throughout the country. They also demanded they like soldiers in Army be sent as members of UN peace keeping missions so that they could accumulate a substantial amount of money as savings to be earned from their deputed services in the missions abroad.
Everybody will agree that the BDR jawans had reasons to feel frustrated if they were denied their dues. But, later what we could glean from TV footages was that the slain Director General of BDR Major General Shakil Ahmed was all along sincere in broaching to the government the plights and deprivation of BDR soldiers. It is difficult for civilians like us to understand why the decades-old traditional supervision of BDR personnel by deputed army officers was all on a sudden a bone of contention that agitated the BDR jawans against the army!
BDR jawans, if they were truly frustrated, could easily stage a mutiny by enfolding the entire BDR camp in Pilkhana and taking all the army officers along with their family members hostage till the government intervened for a solution. Why was the genocide? Why were the officers singled out to be killed? Why were the ladies violated? What was the behind-the-stage motive that prodded the mastermind to design a plot that would guarantee wholesale killing of brilliant army officers in the name of mutiny? Who is the mastermind?
Answers to these questions are difficult even to the investigators who are still poring over the entire episode and sorting out minuscule traces for clues until assimilation, dissection, and crystallization of all the pieces of evidence is complete. Any speculative answer or any conspiracy theory made by an observer may be grossly detrimental to the investigation process.
Whatever the answers the investigators present to the nation at the end of a week or a month, I, like most of the newspaper readers, am confident that the aim of the mastermind of the mutiny was not to help the BDR jawans realise their demands for arrears of dues or for their enlistment as future members of UN peacekeeping missions.
The mastermind merely agitated the jawans reminding them of their deprivations; his main goal however was to kill the army officers either to fulfill his personal desire for vengeance or to help a particular group achieve a broader goal. The broader goal could be to satiate a group of people who, perhaps due to presence of some honest army officers in pivotal positions of BDR, were deprived of their illicit earnings, say, from smuggling or to satiate another group of people who were justifiably or unjustifiably harassed by the Army in their traditional ways of doing business or politics.
We should remember that the masterminds of plots, as history suggests, always remain elusive and invisible in their roles to perform long-term missions. Lest people revolt in frustrations, the masterminds throw for public consumptions grains of psychological fodder like Bangla Bhai of JMB (a rook) or DAD Tauhid of BDR (a knight) or one Tota Mia (a scapegoat) who, protected by bulletproof jackets and helmets and tied in shackles, would periodically appear in TV screens moving in and out of trial courts. They would ultimately be executed satiating the aggrieved TV viewers. But, the TV viewers will never come to learn that the executed were in fact hired hit-men who were duped by the masterminds into detonating the bombs.
However, executions of Bangla Bhai or DAD Tauhid or Tota Mia will not herald an end of a plot or a mutiny as long as the masterminds are able to encapsulate themselves inside a den out of harm's way and are free to engineer the next plot. Unless the investigators are politically neutral, morally honest and professionally aggressive we would continue seeing chess pieces like a castle, a rook, a knight, a king, or a queen being captured by some invisible hands who will continue placing fresh chess pieces on the black and white squares of fresh chessboards to play their chess games over and over again.
The writer is a banker who may be reached at [email protected]