Rokeya University provides financial assistance to Abu Sayed’s family

Rangpur Correspondent: The administration of Begum Rokeya University, Rangpur (BRUR) has provided financial assistance to the family of Abu Sayed, a student of the university’s English department who is widely acknowledged to have been the first victim of the quota reform movement to have died in police firing.

Abu Sayed was known to have been one of the movement’s organisers in Rangpur. In death, he was to become one of its icons.

A delegation from the university handed over a cheque of Tk 7.5 lakh to his parents on Friday. Proctor Shariful Islam said that under the directive of the Vice-Chancellor, the university administration has been in constant contact with Sayed’s parents. He also stated that this assistance would continue.

Sayed’s father said that Abu Sayed was the apple of his eye, and their family even relied on the money he made from private tutoring while completing his studies.

“Losing a child is an unbearable grief, and the hardest thing as a father was to carry my son’s dead body on my shoulders. Now, I only ask everyone to pray for my son,” he told newsmen.

He expressed that while they could not get their son back, having a job for a family member might help them manage better in their later years.

He added that every day someone from the university has checked on them, and many people, both known and unknown, have been helping them.

On July 16, Abu Sayed was killed in police firing during the quota reform movement. Not only was his the first reported death of a protester in police firing during the movement. A video of his apparent killing started doing the rounds on social media that very evening, and quickly went viral.

What it showed only served to fuel greater outrage among the protesters, and was arguably the clincher to forming a judicial commission into the six deaths that occurred that day.

The video showed a group of police converging on Sayed, who has seemingly broken away from the crowd and finds himself isolated on a side street in broad daylight, facing the police. He is gesturing defiantly, with his arms spread wide, egging them on almost, to take their best shot – the timeless gesture of the weak but unbowed towards the strong, of the rebel towards authority.

Yet the most important thing to note here is that clearly unarmed, and on his own, Abu Sayed poses absolutely no threat to anyone, let alone the team of police approaching him – still a good 50-60 feet away. It is also worth remembering that at this point, the situation around the country is nowhere near the state of chaos witnessed later in the week. To reiterate, this is the first death in the movement, about to occur. You cannot excuse it on the pretext of ‘the heat of the battle’.

But unfathomably, as the camera pans towards the approaching officers, one of them – for no apparent reason – is seen casually firing off a shot, as if at target practice. He uses a shotgun, which fires pellets, so the impact of the ‘rubber bullet’ isn’t immediately clear, but Sayed can be seen feeling something on his left side, just below the ribs – it’s on his upper body, so the chances of death or blindness increase significantly. As with most shotgun rounds, you don’t see profuse bleeding, but soon the protester falls to the ground and has to be carried away.

A student who took Sayed to the hospital, said, “Police were firing rubber bullets and tear gas at us. Sayed was hit in the chest and fell unconscious on the street. We took him to the hospital in a battery-run rickshaw. I tried to talk to him, but he did not respond.”

Abu Sayed was declared dead on arrival at Rangpur Medical College Hospital, at 3.05pm on Tuesday, July 16.