Protestors set Sheikh Mujib’s house on fire in Dhaka

DHAKA: A large group of protesters vandalised and set on fire Bangladesh founding president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s residence in Dhaka during a live online address of his daughter Sheikh Hasina Wajid.

In a video shared on social media, a huge crowd was seen outside Sheikh Mujib’s residence, which was torched early Thursday during a speech by his daughter exiled in India.

According to media reports, several thousand people rallied in front of the house in Dhaka’s Dhanmondi area, which was earlier turned into a memorial museum, early evening following a social media call for “Bulldozer Procession” as Hasina was supposed to make her address.

Sheikh Hasina, who fled the country on August 5 last year after her government was brought down, delivered her address organised by the Awami League’s now disbanded student wing Chhatra League and called upon the countrymen to organise a resistance against the current regime.

“They are yet to have the strength to destroy the national flag, the constitution and the independence that we earned at the cost of lives of millions of martyrs with a bulldozer,” Hasina said in an apparent reference to Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus’s incumbent regime, installed by the Anti-Discrimination Students Movement.

She added, “They can demolish a building, but not the history … but they must also remember that the history takes its revenge.”

Sheikh Mujib’s house became an iconic symbol in Bangladesh history as he largely led the pre-independence movement for decades from here.

During successive Awami League rule, when it was turned into a museum, foreign heads of state or dignitaries visited in accordance with state protocol.

Hasina said she and her only surviving sibling had donated their ancestral house to a trust as a public property, turning the building into Bangabandhu Memorial Museum, as Sheikh Mujib was fondly called “Bangabandhu” or “Friend of Bengal”.